There is no greater name in Italian art--therefore no greater inart--than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as highas Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, somysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veilthem from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfectbalance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphaelan appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he iswider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more thepoet-painter of the world and the world's fairest creatures, than anyone of these. Titian is neither the loftiest, the most penetrating, northe most profoundly moved among the great exponents of sacred art, evenof his time and country. Yet is it possible, remembering the_Entombment_ of the Louvre, the _Assunta_, the _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_,the _St. Peter Martyr_, to say that he has, take him all in all, beensurpassed in this the highest branch of his art? Certainly nowhere elsehave the pomp and splendour of the painter's achievement at its apogeebeen so consistently allied to a dignity and simplicity hardly everoverstepping the bounds of nature. The sacred art of no other painter ofthe full sixteenth century--not even that of Raphael himself--has to anequal degree influenced other painters, and moulded the style of theworld, in those great ceremonial altar-pieces in which sacred passionmust perforce express itself with an exaggeration that is notnecessarily a distortion of truth.

And then as a portraitist--we are dealing, be it remembered, withItalian art only--there must be conceded to him the first place, as alimner both of men and women, though each of us may reserve a corner inhis secret heart for some other master. One will remember thedisquieting power, the fascination in the true sense of the word, ofLeonardo; the majesty, the penetration, the uncompromising realism onoccasion, of Raphael; the happy mixture of the Giorgionesque, theRaphaelesque, and later on the Michelangelesque, in Sebastiano delPiombo. Another will yearn for the poetic glamour, gilding realistictruth, of Giorgione; for the intensely pathetic interpretation ofLorenzo Lotto, with its unique combination of the strongest subjectiveand objective elements, the one serving to poetise and accentuate theother. Yet another will cite the lofty melancholy, the aristocraticcharm of the Brescian Moretto, or the marvellous power of theBergamasque Moroni to present in their natural union, with noindiscretion of over-emphasis, the spiritual and physical elements whichgo to make up that mystery of mysteries, the human individuality. Thereis, however, no advocate of any of these great masters who, havingvaunted the peculiar perfections in portraiture of his own favourite,will not end--with a sigh perhaps--by according the palm to Titian.

In landscape his pre-eminence is even more absolute and unquestioned. Hehad great precursors here, but no equal; and until Claude Lorrain longafterwards arose, there appeared no successor capable, like himself, ofexpressing the quintessence of Nature's most significant beautieswithout a too slavish adherence to any special set of natural facts.Giovanni Bellini from his earliest Mantegnesque or Paduan days had,unlike his great brother-in-law, unlike the true Squarcionesques, andthe Ferrarese who more or less remotely came within the Squarcionesqueinfluence, the true gift of the landscape-painter. Atmosphericconditions formed invariably an important element of his conceptions;and to see that this is so we need only remember the chilly solemnity ofthe landscape in the great _Pieta_ of the Brera, the ominous sunset inour own _Agony in the Garden_ of the National Gallery, the cheerfulall-pervading glow of the beautiful little _Sacred Conversation_ at theUffizi, the mysterious illumination of the late _Baptism of Christ_ inthe Church of S. Corona at Vicenza. To attempt a discussion of thelandscape of Giorgione would be to enter upon the most perilous, as wellas the most fascinating of subjects--so various is it even in the fewwell-established examples of his art, so exquisite an instrument ofexpression always, so complete an exterioration of the complex moods ofhis personages. Yet even the landscape of Giorgione--judging it fromsuch unassailable works of his riper time as the great altar-piece ofCastelfranco, the so-called _Stormy Landscape with the Gipsy and theSoldier_[1] in the Giovanelli Palace at Venice, and the so-called _ThreePhilosophers_ in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--has in it still aslight flavour of the ripe archaic just merging into full perfection. Itwas reserved for Titian to give in his early time the fullestdevelopment to the Giorgionesque landscape, as in the _Three Ages_ andthe _Sacred and Profane Love_. Then all himself, and with hardly a rivalin art, he went on to unfold those radiantly beautiful prospects ofearth and sky which enframe the figures in the _Worship of Venus_, the_Bacchanal_, and, above all, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_; to give back hisimpressions of Nature in those rich backgrounds of reposeful beautywhich so enhance the finest of the Holy Families and SacredConversations. It was the ominous grandeur of the landscape in the _St.Peter Martyr_, even more than the dramatic intensity, the academicamplitude of the figures, that won for the picture its universal fame.The same intimate relation between the landscape and the figures may besaid to exist in the late _Jupiter and Antiope (Venere del Pardo)_ ofthe Louvre, with its marked return to Giorgionesque repose andGiorgionesque communion with Nature; in the late _Rape of Europa_, thebold sweep and the rainbow hues of the landscape in which recall themuch earlier _Bacchus and Ariadne_. In the exquisite _Shepherd andNymph_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna--a masterpiece in monotone ofquite the last period--the sensuousness of the early Giorgionesque timereappears, even more strongly emphasised; yet it is kept in balance, asin the early days, by the imaginative temperament of the poet, by thatsolemn atmosphere of mystery, above all, which belongs to the finalyears of Titian's old age.

Thus, though there cannot be claimed for Titian that universality in artand science which the lovers of Leonardo's painting must ever deplore,since it lured him into a thousand side-paths; for the vastness of scopeof Michelangelo, or even the all-embracing curiosity of Albrecht Duerer;it must be seen that as a _painter_ he covered more ground than anyfirst-rate master of the sixteenth century. While in more than onebranch of the painter's art he stood forth supreme and without a rival,in most others he remained second to none, alone in great pictorialdecorations of the monumental order yielding the palm to his youngerrivals Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, who showed themselves morepractised and more successfully daring in this particular branch.

To find another instance of such supreme mastery of the brush, suchparallel activity in all the chief branches of oil-painting, one must goto Antwerp, the great merchant city of the North as Venice was, or hadbeen, the great merchant city of the South. Rubens, who might fairly bestyled the Flemish Titian, and who indeed owed much to his Venetianpredecessor, though far less than did his own pupil Van Dyck, was duringthe first forty years of the seventeenth century on the same pinnacle ofsupremacy that the Cadorine master had occupied for a much longer periodduring the Renaissance. He, too, was without a rival in the creation ofthose vast altar-pieces which made the fame of the churches that ownedthem; he, too, was the finest painter of landscape of his time, as anaccessory to the human figure. Moreover, he was a portrait-painter who,in his greatest efforts--those sumptuous and almost truculent _portraitsd'apparat_ of princes, nobles, and splendid dames--knew no superior,though his contemporaries were Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, andVelazquez. Rubens folded his Mother Earth and his fellow-man in a moredemonstrative, a seemingly closer embrace, drawing from the contact amore exuberant vigour, but taking with him from its very closeness someof the stain of earth. Titian, though he was at least as genuine arealist as his successor, and one less content, indeed, with the mereoutsides of things, was penetrated with the spirit of beauty which waseverywhere--in the mountain home of his birth as in the radiant home ofhis adoption, in himself as in his everyday surroundings. His art hadever, even in its most human and least aspiring phases, the divineharmony, the suavity tempering natural truth and passion, thatdistinguishes Italian art of the great periods from the finest art thatis not Italian.

The relation of the two masters--both of them in the first line of theworld's painters--was much that of Venice to Antwerp. The apogee of eachcity in its different way represented the highest point that modernEurope had reached of physical well-being and splendour, of material asdistinguished from mental culture. But then Venice was wrapped in thetransfiguring atmosphere of the Lagunes, and could see, towering abovethe rich Venetian plains and the lower slopes of the Friulan mountains,the higher, the more aspiring peaks of the purer region. Reality, withall its warmth and all its truth, in Venetian art was still reality. Butit was reality made at once truer, wider, and more suave by the methodof presentment. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, couldadd nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, thesplendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to thegenuine naturalness of such a mode of life. Art itself could only add toit the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, thecolouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression tothe beauties of the land, to the force, character, and warm human charmof the people. This is what Titian, supreme among his contemporaries ofthe greatest Venetian time, did with an incomparable mastery to which,in the vast field which his productions cover, it would be vain to seekfor a parallel.

Other Venetians may, in one or the other way, more irresistibly enlistour sympathies, or may shine out for the moment more brilliantly in somespecial branch of their art; yet, after all, we find ourselvesinvariably comparing them to Titian, not Titian to them--taking _him_ asthe standard for the measurement of even his greatest contemporaries andsuccessors. Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may be,combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in hiscreation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which hasnever in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But thenTitian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly thepoet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to ahigher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had beenable to achieve. The gifted but unequal Pordenone, who showed himself soincapable of sustained rivalry with our master in Venice, had moments ofa higher sublimity than Titian reached until he came to the extremelimits of old age. That this assertion is not a mere paradox, the great_Madonna del Carmelo_ at the Venice Academy and the magnificent_Trinity_ in the sacristy of the Cathedral of San Daniele near Udine maybe taken to prove. Yet who would venture to compare him on equal termsto the painter of the _Assunta_, the _Entombment_ and the _Christ atEmmaus_? Tintoretto, at his best, has lightning flashes of illumination,a Titanic vastness, an inexplicable power of perturbing the spirit andplacing it in his own atmosphere, which may cause the imaginative notaltogether unreasonably to put him forward as the greater figure in art.All the same, if it were necessary to make a definite choice between thetwo, who would not uphold the saner and greater art of Titian, eventhough it might leave us nearer to reality, though it might conceive thesupreme tragedies, not less than the happy interludes, of the sacreddrama, in the purely human spirit and with the pathos of earth? A notdissimilar comparison might be instituted between the portraits ofLorenzo Lotto and those of our master. No Venetian painter of the goldenprime had that peculiar imaginativeness of Lotto, which caused him,while seeking to penetrate into the depths of the human individualitysubmitted to him, to infuse into it unconsciously much of his owntremulous sensitiveness and charm. In this way no portraits of thesixteenth century provide so fascinating a series of riddles. Yet indeciphering them it is very necessary to take into account the peculiartemperament of the painter himself, as well as the physical and mentalcharacteristics of the sitter and the atmosphere of the time.[2]

Yet where is the critic bold enough to place even the finest of theseexquisite productions on the same level as _Le Jeune Homme au Gant_ and_L'Homme en Noir_ of the Louvre, the _Ippolito de' Medici_, the _Belladi Tiziano_, the _Aretino_ of the Pitti, the _Charles V. at the Battleof Muehlberg_ and the full-length _Philip II._ of the Prado Museum atMadrid?

Finally, in the domain of pure colour some will deem that Titian hasserious rivals in those Veronese developed into Venetians, the two elderBonifazi and Paolo Veronese; that is, there will be found lovers ofpainting who prefer a brilliant mastery over contrasting colours infrank juxtaposition to a palette relatively restricted, used with an artmore subtle, if less dazzling than theirs, and resulting in a deeper,graver richness, a more significant beauty, if in a less stimulatinggaiety and variety of aspect. No less a critic than Morelli himselfpronounced the elder Bonifazio Veronese to be the most brilliantcolourist of the Venetian school; and the _Dives and Lazarus_ of theVenice Academy, the _Finding of Moses_ at the Brera are at hand to givesolid support to such an assertion.

In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held to be thegreatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to befound in the whole range of Italian art. Starting from the cardinalprinciples in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors--painters suchas Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri,Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci--Caliaridared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy aswell as the subtlest and most unfamiliar. Unlike his predecessors,however, he preserved the stimulating charm while abolishing theabruptness of sheer contrast. This he did mainly by balancing andtempering his dazzling hues with huge architectural masses of a vibrantgrey and large depths of cool dark shadow--brown shot through withsilver. No other Venetian master could have painted the _Mystic Marriageof St. Catherine_ in the church of that name at Venice, the _Allegoryon the Victory of Lepanto_ in the Palazzo Ducale, or the vast _Nozze diCana_ of the Louvre. All the same, this virtuosity, while it is in onesense a step in advance even of Giorgione, Titian, Palma, and ParisBordone--constituting as it does more particularly a further developmentof painting from the purely decorative standpoint--must appear just alittle superficial, a little self-conscious, by the side of the nobler,graver, and more profound, if in some ways more limited methods ofTitian. With him, as with Giorgione, and, indeed, with Tintoretto,colour was above all an instrument of expression. The main effort was togive a realisation, at once splendid and penetrating in its truth, ofthe subject presented; and colour in accordance with the true Venetianprinciple was used not only as the decorative vesture, but as the verybody and soul of painting--as what it is, indeed, in Nature.

To put forward Paolo Veronese as merely the dazzling virtuoso would allthe same be to show a singular ignorance of the true scope of his art.He can rise as high in dramatic passion and pathos as the greatest ofthem all, when he is in the vein; but these are precisely the occasionson which he most resolutely subordinates his colour to his subject andmakes the most poetic use of chiaroscuro; as in the great altar-piece_The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_ in the church of that name, the toolittle known _St. Francis receiving the Stigmata_ on a ceilingcompartment of the Academy of Arts at Vienna, and the wonderful_Crucifixion_ which not many years ago was brought down from thesky-line of the Long Gallery in the Louvre, and placed, where itdeserves to be, among the masterpieces. And yet in this last piece thecolour is not only in a singular degree interpretative of the subject,but at the same time technically astonishing--with certain subtleties ofunusual juxtaposition and modulation, delightful to the craftsman, whichare hardly seen again until we come to the latter half of the presentcentury. So that here we have the great Veneto-Veronese master escapingaltogether from our theory, and showing himself at one and the same timeprofoundly moving, intensely significant, and admirably decorative incolour. Still what was with him the splendid exception was with Titian,and those who have been grouped with Titian, the guiding rule of art.Though our master remains, take him all in all, the greatest of Venetiancolourists, he never condescends to vaunt all that he knows, or toselect his subjects as a groundwork for bravura, even the mostlegitimate. He is the greatest painter of the sixteenth century, justbecause, being the greatest colourist of the higher order, and inlegitimate mastery of the brush second to none, he makes the worthiestuse of his unrivalled accomplishment, not merely to call down theapplause due to supreme pictorial skill and the victory over self-setdifficulties, but, above all, to give the fullest and most legitimateexpression to the subjects which he presents, and through them tohimself.

CHAPTER I

Cadore and Venice--Early Giorgionesque works up to the date of theresidence in Padua--New interpretations of Giorgione's and Titian'spictures.

Tiziano Vecelli was born in or about the year 1477 at Pieve di Cadore, adistrict of the southern Tyrol then belonging to the Republic of Venice,and still within the Italian frontier. He was the son of Gregorio diConte Vecelli by his wife Lucia, his father being descended from anancient family of the name of Guecello (or Vecellio), established in thevalley of Cadore. An ancestor, Ser Guecello di Tommasro da Pozzale, hadbeen elected Podesta of Cadore as far back as 1321.[3] The name Tizianowould appear to have been a traditional one in the family. Among otherswe find a contemporary Tiziano Vecelli, who is a lawyer of noteconcerned in the administration of Cadore, keeping up a kind ofobsequious friendship with his famous cousin at Venice. The Tizianellowho, in 1622, dedicated to the Countess of Arundel an anonymous Life ofTitian known as Tizianello's _Anonimo_, and died at Venice in 1650, wasTitian's cousin thrice removed.

Gregorio Vecelli was a valiant soldier, distinguished for his bravery inthe field and his wisdom in the council of Cadore, but not, it may beassumed, possessed of wealth or, in a poor mountain district likeCadore, endowed with the means of obtaining it. The other offspring ofthe marriage with Lucia were Francesco,--supposed, though withoutsubstantial proof, to have been older than his brother,--Caterina, andOrsa. At the age of nine, according to Dolce in the _Dialogo dellaPittura_, or of ten, according to Tizianello's _Anonimo_, Titian wastaken from Cadore to Venice, there to enter upon the serious study ofpainting. Whether he had previously received some slight tuition in therudiments of the art, or had only shown a natural inclination to becomea painter, cannot be ascertained with any precision; nor is the point,indeed, one of any real importance. What is much more vital in our studyof the master's life-work is to ascertain how far the scenery of hisnative Cadore left a permanent impress on his landscape art, and in whatway his descent from a family of mountaineers and soldiers, hardy, yetof a certain birth and breeding, contributed to shape his individualityin its development to maturity. It has been almost universally assumedthat Titian throughout his career made use of the mountain scenery ofCadore in the backgrounds to his pictures; and yet, if we except thegreat _Battle of Cadore_ itself (now known only in Fontana's print, in areduced version of part of the composition to be found at the Uffizi,and in a drawing of Rubens at the Albertina), this is only true in amodified sense. Undoubtedly, both in the backgrounds to altar-pieces,Holy Families, and Sacred Conversations, and in the landscape drawingsof the type so freely copied and adapted by Domenico Campagnola, we findthe jagged, naked peaks of the Dolomites aspiring to the heavens. In themajority of instances, however, the middle distance and foreground tothese is not the scenery of the higher Alps, with its abrupt contrasts,its monotonous vesture of fir or pine forests clothing the mountainsides, and its relatively harsh and cold colouring, but the richervegetation of the Friulan mountains in their lower slopes, or of thebeautiful hills bordering upon the overflowing richness of the Venetianplain. Here the painter found greater variety, greater softness in theplay of light, and a richness more suitable to the character of Venetianart. All these tracts of country, as well as the more grandiose sceneryof his native Cadore itself, he had the amplest opportunities forstudying in the course of his many journeyings from Venice to Pieve andback, as well as in his shorter expeditions on the Venetian mainland.How far Titian's Alpine origin, and his early bringing-up among needymountaineers, may be taken to account for his excessive eagerness toreap all the material advantages of his artistic pre-eminence, for hisunresting energy when any post was to be obtained or any payment to begot in, must be a matter for individual appreciation. JosiahGilbert--quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle[4]--pertinently asks, "Mightthis mountain man have been something of a 'canny Scot' or a shrewdSwiss?" In the getting, Titian was certainly all this, but in thespending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour andvoluptuousness, even more in the second than in the first half of hiscareer. Vasari relates that Titian was lodged at Venice with his uncle,an "honourable citizen," who, seeing his great inclination for painting,placed him under Giovanni Bellini, in whose style he soon became aproficient. Dolce, apparently better instructed, gives, in his _Dialogodella Pittura_, Zuccato, best known as a mosaic worker, as his firstmaster; next makes him pass into the studio of Gentile Bellini, andthence into that of the _caposcuola_ Giovanni Bellini; to take, however,the last and by far the most important step of his early career when hebecomes the pupil and partner, or assistant, of Giorgione. Morelli[5]would prefer to leave Giovanni Bellini altogether out of Titian'sartistic descent. However this may be, certain traces of Gentile'sinfluence may be observed in the art of the Cadorine painter, especiallyin the earlier portraiture, but indeed in the methods of technicalexecution generally. On the other hand, no extant work of his beginningssuggests the view that he was one of the inner circle of Gian Bellino'spupils--one of the _discipuli_, as some of these were fond of describingthemselves. No young artist painting in Venice in the last years of thefifteenth century could, however, entirely withdraw himself from theinfluence of the veteran master, whether he actually belonged to hisfollowing or not. Gian Bellino exercised upon the contemporary art ofVenice and the _Veneto_ an influence not less strong of its kind thanthat which radiated from Leonardo over Milan and the adjacent regionsduring his Milanese period. The latter not only stamped his art on theworks of his own special school, but fascinated in the long run thepainters of the specifically Milanese group which sprang from Foppa andBorgognone--such men as Ambrogio de' Predis, Bernardino de' Conti, and,indeed, the somewhat later Bernardino Luini himself. To the fashion forthe Bellinesque conceptions of a certain class, even Alvise Vivarini,the vigorous head of the opposite school in its latest Quattrocentodevelopment, bowed when he painted the Madonnas of the Redentore and S.Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, and that similar one now in the ViennaGallery. Lorenzo Lotto, whose artistic connection with Alvise Mr.Bernard Berenson was the first to trace, is to a marked extent under theparamount influence of Giovanni Bellini in such works as the altar-pieceof S. Cristina near Treviso, the _Madonna and Child with Saints_ in theEllesmere collection, and the _Madonna and Child with St. Peter Martyr_in the Naples Gallery, while in the _Marriage of St. Catherine_ atMunich, though it belongs to the early time, he is, both as regardsexaggerations of movement and delightful peculiarities of colour,essentially himself. Marco Basaiti, who, up to the date of Alvise'sdeath, was intimately connected with him, and, so far as he could,faithfully reproduced the characteristics of his incisive style, in hislater years was transformed into something very like a satellite ofGiovanni Bellini. Cima, who in his technical processes belongs rather tothe Vivarini than to the Bellini group, is to a great extentovershadowed, though never, as some would have it, absorbed to the pointof absolute imitation, by his greater contemporary.

What may legitimately excite surprise in the beginnings both ofGiorgione and Titian, so far as they are at present ascertained, is notso much that in their earliest productions they to a certain extent leanon Giovanni Bellini, as that they are so soon themselves. Neither ofthem is in any extant work seen to stand in the same absolutelydependent relation to the veteran Quattrocentist which Raphael for atime held towards Perugino, which Sebastiano Luciani in his earliestmanhood held towards Giorgione. This holds good to a certain extent alsoof Lorenzo Lotto, who, in the earliest known examples--the so-called_Danae_ of Sir Martin Conway's collection, and the _St. Jerome_ of theLouvre--is already emphatically Lotto, though, as his art passes throughsuccessive developments, he will still show himself open to more or lessenduring influences from the one side and the other. Sebastiano delPiombo, on the other hand, great master as he must undoubtedly beaccounted in every successive phase, is never throughout his career outof leading-strings. First, as a boy, he paints the puzzling _Pieta_ inthe Layard Collection at Venice, which, notwithstanding the authenticinscription, "Bastian Luciani fuit descipulus Johannes Bellinus(sic)," is so astonishingly like a Cima that, without this piece ofdocumentary evidence, it would even now pass as such. Next, he becomesthe most accomplished exponent of the Giorgionesque manner, save perhapsTitian himself. Then, migrating to Rome, he produces, in aquasi-Raphaelesque style still strongly tinged with the Giorgionesque,that series of superb portraits which, under the name of Sanzio, haveacquired a world-wide fame. Finally, surrendering himself body and soulto Michelangelo, and only unconsciously, from the force of earlytraining and association, allowing his Venetian origin to reveal itself,he remains enslaved by the tremendous genius of the Florentine to thevery end of his career.

Giorgione and Titian were as nearly as possible of the same age, beingboth of them born in or about 1477. Lorenzo Lotto's birth is to beplaced about the year 1476--or, as others would have it, 1480. Palma sawthe light about 1480, Pordenone in 1483, Sebastiano Luciani in 1485. Sothat most of the great protagonists of Venetian art during the earlierhalf of the Cinquecento were born within the short period of eightyears--between 1477 and 1485.

In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's _Life and Times of Titian_ a revolutionarytheory, foreshadowed in their _Painting in North Italy_, was for thefirst time deliberately put forward and elaborately sustained. Theysought to convince the student, as they had convinced themselves, thatPalma, issuing from Gian Bellino and Giorgione, strongly influenced andshaped the art of his contemporary Titian, instead of having beeninfluenced by him, as the relative position and age of the two artistswould have induced the student to believe. Crowe and Cavalcaselle'stheory rested in the main, though not so entirely as Giovanni Morelliappears to have held, on the signature and the early date (1500) to befound on a _Santa Conversazione_, once in the collection of M. Reiset,and now at Chantilly in that of the late Due d'Aumale. This date nowproves with the artist's signature to be a forgery, and the picture inquestion, which, with strong traces still of the Bellinesque mode ofconception and the Bellinesque style, shows a larger and more moderntechnique, can no longer be cited as proving the priority of Palma inthe development of the full Renaissance types and the full Renaissancemethods of execution. There can be small doubt that this particulartheory of the indefatigable critics, to whom the history of Italian artowes so much, will little by little be allowed to die a natural death,if it be not, indeed, already defunct. More and more will the view soforcibly stated by Giovanni Morelli recommend itself, that Palma in manyof those elements of his art most distinctively Palmesque leans upon themaster of Cadore. The Bergamasque painter was not indeed a personalityin art sufficiently strong and individual to dominate a Titian, or toleave upon his style and methods profound and enduring traces. As such,Crowe and Cavalcaselle themselves hesitate to put him forward, thoughthey cling with great persistency to their pet theory of his influence.This exquisite artist, though by no means inventive genius, did, on theother hand, permanently shape the style of Cariani and the two elderBonifazi; imparting, it may be, also some of his voluptuous charm in therendering of female loveliness to Paris Bordone, though the latter must,in the main, be looked upon as the artistic offspring of Titian.

It is by no means certain, all the same, that this question of influenceimparted and submitted to can with advantage be argued with suchabsoluteness of statement as has been the rule up to the present time,both on the one side and the other. It should be remembered that we aredealing with three young painters of about the same age, working in thesame art-centre, perhaps, even, for a time in the same studio--issuing,at any rate, all three from the flank of Giovanni Bellini. In asituation like this, it is not only the preponderance of age--two orthree years at the most, one way or the other--that is to be taken intoaccount, but the preponderance of genius and the magic gift ofinfluence. It is easy to understand how the complete renewal, broughtabout by Giorgione on the basis of Bellini's teaching and example,operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw opento art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fulness ofsensuous yearning commingled with spiritual aspiration. Irresistible wasthe fascination exercised both by his art and his personality over hisyouthful contemporaries; more and more did the circle of his influencewiden, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellinohimself was brought within it. With Barbarelli, at any rate, there couldbe no question of light received back from painters of his owngeneration in exchange for that diffused around him; but with Titian andPalma the case was different. The germs of the Giorgionesque fell herein each case upon a fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorousplant of the same family, yet with all its Giorgionesque colour of aquite distinctive loveliness. Titian, we shall see, carried the style toits highest point of material development, and made of it in many ways anew thing. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, innature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament thanGiorgione, Titian, or Lotto. Morelli has called attention to thatelement of downright energy in his mountain nature which in a waycounteracts the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interpretsthe charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese criticattributes this to the Bergamasque origin of the artist, showing itselfbeneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of thisfrank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this _terre aterre_ energy on the other, may have been reflected in the early work ofTitian, though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he wasinfluenced?[6] There is undoubtedly in his personal development of theGiorgionesque a superadded element of something much nearer to theeveryday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, andthis not easily definable element is peculiar also to Palma's art, inwhich, indeed, it endures to the end. Thus there is a singularresemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in theimportant _Adam and Eve_ of his earlier time in the BrunswickGallery--once, like so many other things, attributed to Giorgione--andthe preferred type of youthful female loveliness as it is to be found inTitian's _Three Ages_ at Bridgewater House, in his so-called _Sacred andProfane Love (Medea and Venus)_ of the Borghese Gallery, in such sacredpieces as the _Madonna and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ at the PradoGallery of Madrid, and the large _Madonna and Child with four Saints_ atDresden. In both instances we have the Giorgionesque conception strippedof a little of its poetic glamour, but retaining unabashed its splendidsensuousness, which is thus made the more markedly to stand out. Wenotice, too, in Titian's works belonging to this particular groupanother characteristic which may be styled Palmesque, if only becausePalma indulged in it in a great number of his Sacred Conversations andsimilar pieces. This is the contrasting of the rich brown skin, themuscular form, of some male saint, or it may be some shepherd of theuplands, with the dazzling fairness, set off with hair of pale or ruddygold, of a female saint, or a fair Venetian doing duty as a shepherdessor a heroine of antiquity. Are we to look upon such distinguishingcharacteristics as these--and others that could easily be singledout--as wholly and solely Titianesque of the early time? If so, we oughtto assume that what is most distinctively Palmesque in the art of Palmacame from the painter of Cadore, who in this case should be taken tohave transmitted to his brother in art the Giorgionesque in the lesssubtle shape into which he had already transmuted it. But should notsuch an assumption as this, well founded as it may appear in the main,be made with all the allowances which the situation demands?

That, when a group of young and enthusiastic artists, eager to overturnbarriers, are found painting more or less together, it is not so easy tounravel the tangle of influences and draw hard-and-fast lineseverywhere, one or two modern examples much nearer to our own time mayroughly serve to illustrate. Take, for instance, the friendship thatdeveloped itself between the youthful Bonington and the youthfulDelacroix while they copied together in the galleries of the Louvre: theone communicating to the other something of the stimulating quality, thefrankness, and variety of colour which at that moment distinguished theEnglish from the French school; the other contributing to shape, withthe fire of his romantic temperament, the art of the young Englishmanwho was some three years his junior. And with the famous trio of theP.R.B.--Millais, Rossetti, and Mr. Holman Hunt--who is to state _excathedra_ where influence was received, where transmitted; or whetherthe first may fairly be held to have been, during the short time oftheir complete union, the master-hand, the second the poet-soul, thethird the conscience of the group? A similar puzzle would await him whoshould strive to unravel the delicate thread which winds itself roundthe artistic relation between Frederick Walker and the noted landscapistMr. J.W. North. Though we at once recognise Walker as the dominantspirit, and see his influence even to-day, more than twenty years afterhis death, affirmed rather than weakened, there are certaincharacteristics of the style recognised and imitated as his, of whichit would be unsafe to declare that he and not his companion originatedthem.

In days of artistic upheaval and growth like the last years of thefifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, the _milieu_must count for a great deal. It must be remembered that the men who mostinfluence a time, whether in art or letters, are just those who, deeplyrooted in it, come forth as its most natural development. Let it not bedoubted that when in Giorgione's breast had been lighted the firstsparks of the Promethean fire, which, with the soft intensity of itsglow, warmed into full-blown perfection the art of Venice, that fire ranlike lightning through the veins of all the artistic youth, hiscontemporaries and juniors, just because their blood was of the stuff toignite and flame like his own.

The great Giorgionesque movement in Venetian art was not a questionmerely of school, of standpoint, of methods adopted and developed by abrilliant galaxy of young painters. It was not alone that "they who wereexcellent confessed, that he (Giorgione) was born to put the breath oflife into painted figures, and to imitate the elasticity and colour offlesh, etc."[7] It was also that the Giorgionesque in conception andstyle was the outcome of the moment in art and life, just as thePheidian mode had been the necessary climax of Attic art and Attic lifeaspiring to reach complete perfection in the fifth century B.C.; just asthe Raphaelesque appeared the inevitable outcome of those elements oflofty generalisation, divine harmony, grace clothing strength, which, inFlorence and Rome, as elsewhere in Italy, were culminating in the firstyears of the Cinquecento. This was the moment, too, when--to take oneinstance only among many--the Ex-Queen of Cyprus, the noble VenetianCaterina Cornaro, held her little court at Asolo, where, in accordancewith the spirit of the moment, the chief discourse was ever of love. Inthat reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina'scourtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty,Pietro Bembo wrote for "Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessaillustrissima di Ferrara," and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius,the leaflets which, under the title _Gli Asolani, ne' quali si ragionad' amore_,[8] soon became a famous book in Italy.

[Illustration: _The Man of Sorrows. In the Scuola di S. Rocco, Venice.From a Photograph by Naya_.]

The most Bellinesque work of Titian's youth with which we are acquaintedis the curious _Man of Sorrows_ of the Scuola di S. Rocco at Venice, awork so faded, so injured by restoration that to dogmatise as to itstechnique would be in the highest degree unsafe. The type approaches,among the numerous versions of the _Pieta_ by and ascribed to GiovanniBellini, most nearly to that in the Palazzo del Commune at Rimini.Seeing that Titian was in 1500 twenty-three years old, and a student ofpainting of some thirteen years' standing, there may well exist, or atany rate there may well have existed, from his hand things in a yetearlier and more distinctively Quattrocento-style than anything withwhich we are at present acquainted. This _Man of Sorrows_ itself maywell be a little earlier than 1500, but on this point it is not easy toform a definite conclusion. Perhaps it is reserved in the future tosome student uniting the qualities of patience and keen insight to dofor the youthful Titian what Morelli and his school have done forCorreggio--that is, to restore to him a series of paintings earlier indate than those which criticism has, up to the present time, beencontent to accept as showing his first independent steps in art.Everything else that we can at present safely attribute to the youthfulVecelli is deeply coloured with the style and feeling of Giorgione,though never, as is the case with the inferior Giorgionesques, soentirely as to obliterate the strongly marked individuality of thepainter himself. The _Virgin and Child_ in the Imperial Gallery ofVienna, popularly known as _La Zingarella_, which, by general consent,is accepted as the first in order of date among the works of this class,is still to a certain extent Bellinesque in the mode of conception andarrangement. Yet, in the depth, strength, and richness of thecolour-chord, in the atmospheric spaciousness and charm of the landscapebackground, in the breadth of the draperies, it is alreadyGiorgionesque. Nay, even here Titian, above all, asserts _himself_, andlays the foundation of his own manner. The type of the divine Bambinodiffers widely from that adopted by Giorgione in the altar-pieces ofCastelfranco and the Prado Museum at Madrid. The virgin is a womanbeautified only by youth and intensity of maternal love. Both Giorgioneand Titian in their loveliest types of womanhood are sensuous ascompared with the Tuscans and Umbrians, or with such painters asCavazzola of Verona and the suave Milanese, Bernardino Luini. ButGiorgione's sensuousness is that which may fitly characterise thegoddess, while Titian's is that of the woman, much nearer to theeveryday world in which both artists lived.

In the Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg is abeautiful _Madonna and Child_ in a niche of coloured marble mosaic,which is catalogued as an early Titian under the influence of GiovanniBellini. Judging only from the reproduction on a large scale done byMessrs. Braun and Co., the writer has ventured to suggestelsewhere[9]--prefacing his suggestions with the avowal that he is notacquainted with the picture itself--that we may have here, not an earlyTitian, but that rarer thing an early Giorgione. From the list of theformer master's works it must at any rate be struck out, as even themost superficial comparison with, for instance, _La Zingarella_suffices to prove. In the notable display of Venetian art made at theNew Gallery in the winter of 1895 were included two pictures (Nos. 1 and7 in the catalogue) ascribed to the early time of Titian and evidentlyfrom the same hand. These were a _Virgin and Child_ from the collection,so rich in Venetian works, of Mr. R.H. Benson (formerly among theBurghley House pictures), and a less well-preserved _Virgin and Childwith Saints_ from the collection of Captain Holford at Dorchester House.The former is ascribed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to the early time ofthe master himself.[10] Both are, in their rich harmony of colour andtheir general conception, entirely Giorgionesque. They reveal the handof some at present anonymous Venetian of the second order, standingmidway between the young Giorgione and the young Titian--one who, whileimitating the types and the landscape of these greater contemporariesof his, replaced their depth and glow by a weaker, a more superficialprettiness, which yet has its own suave charm.

[Illustration: _Virgin and Child, known as "La Zingarella." ImperialGallery, Vienna. From a Photograph by Loewy_.]

The famous _Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Chiesa di S. Rocco atVenice is first, in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, ascribed byVasari to Giorgione, and then in the subsequent Life of Titian given tothat master, but to a period very much too late in his career. Thebiographer quaintly adds: "This figure, which many have believed to befrom the hand of Giorgione, is to-day the most revered object in Venice,and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian andGiorgione together ever gained in the whole course of their life." Thistoo great popularity of the work as a wonder-working picture is perhapsthe cause that it is to-day in a state as unsatisfactory as is the _Manof Sorrows_ in the adjacent Scuola. The picture which presents "Christdragged along by the executioner, with two spectators in thebackground," resembles most among Giorgione's authentic creations the_Christ bearing the Cross_ in the Casa Loschi at Vicenza. Theresemblance is not, however, one of colour and technique, since thislast--one of the earliest of Giorgiones--still recalls Giovanni Bellini,and perhaps even more strongly Cima; it is one of type and conception.In both renderings of the divine countenance there is--or it may be thewriter fancies that there is--underlying that expression of serenity andhumiliation accepted which is proper to the subject, a sinister,disquieting look, almost a threat. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have calledattention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, ascompared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similardisproportion is to be observed in another early Titian, the _Christbetween St. Andrew and St. Catherine_ in the Church of SS. Ermagora andFortunato (commonly called S. Marcuola) at Venice. Here the head of theinfant Christ, who stands on a pedestal holding the Orb, between the twosaints above mentioned, is strangely out of proportion to the rest.Crowe and Cavalcaselle had refused to accept this picture as a genuineTitian (vol. ii. p. 432), but Morelli restored it to its rightful placeamong the early works.

Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the _ThreeAges_ and the _Sacred and Profane Love_, the writer is inclined to placethe _Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI. to St.Peter_, once in the collection of Charles I.[11] and now in the AntwerpGallery. The main elements of Titian's art may be seen here, inimperfect fusion, as in very few even of his early productions. The notvery dignified St. Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with ahigh relief of classic design, of the type which we shall find again inthe _Sacred and Profane Love_, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or rather hisimmediate followers; the magnificently robed Alexander VI. (RodrigoBorgia), wearing the triple tiara, gives back the style in portraitureof Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio; while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro--anecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander offleets, as the background suggests--is one of the most characteristicportraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos, its intensity,contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same_Baffo_ in the renowned _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, painted twenty-threeyears later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. Itis the first in order of a great series, including the _Ariosto_ ofCobham, the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, the _Portrait of a Man_ in the AltePinakothek of Munich, and perhaps the famous _Concert_ of the Pitti,ascribed to Giorgione. Both Crowe and Cavalcaselle and M. GeorgesLafenestre[12] have called attention to the fact that the detestedBorgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannotwell have been executed after that time. He would have been a bold manwho should have attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI.into a votive picture painted immediately after his death! How is itpossible to assume, as the eminent critics do nevertheless assume, thatthe _Sacred and Profane Love_, one of the masterpieces of Venetian art,was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or, at thelatest, in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgionehimself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not paintedhis Castelfranco altar-piece, his _Venus_, or his _Three Philosophers(Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas)_. Old Gian Bellino himself had not enteredupon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great S.Zaccaria altar-piece finished in 1505.[13]

It is impossible on the present occasion to give any detailed accountof the fresco decorations painted by Giorgione and Titian on the facadesof the new Fondaco de' Tedeschi, erected to replace that burnt down onthe 28th of January 1505. Full particulars will be found in Crowe andCavalcaselle's often-quoted work. Vasari's many manifest errors anddisconcerting transpositions in the biography of Titian do notpredispose us to give unlimited credence to his account of the strainedrelations between Giorgione and our painter, to which this particularbusiness is supposed to have given rise. That they together decoratedwith a series of frescoes which acquired considerable celebrity theexterior of the Fondaco is all that is known for certain, Titian beingapparently employed as the subordinate of his friend and master. Ofthese frescoes only one figure, doubtfully assigned to Titian, andfacing the Grand Canal, has been preserved, in a much-damagedcondition--the few fragments that remained of those facing the sidecanal having been destroyed in 1884.[14] Vasari shows us a Giorgioneangry because he has been complimented by friends on the superior beautyof some work on the "_facciata di verso la Merceria,_" which in realitybelongs to Titian, and thereupon implacably cutting short theirconnection and friendship. This version is confirmed by Dolce, butrefuted by the less contemporary authority of Tizianello's _Anonimo_. Ofwhat great painters, standing in the relation of master and pupil, havenot such stories been told, and--the worst of it is--told with a certainfoundation of truth? Apocryphal is, no doubt, that which has evolveditself from the internal evidence supplied by the _Baptism of Christ_ ofVerrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci; but a stronger substructure of factsupports the unpleasing anecdotes as to Titian and Tintoretto, as toWatteau and Pater, as to our own Hudson and Reynolds, and, alas! as tovery many others. How touching, on the other hand, is that simple entryin Francesco Francia's day-book, made when his chief journeyman,Timoteo Viti, leaves him: "1495 a di 4 aprile e partito il mio caroTimoteo; chi Dio li dia ogni bene et fortuna!" ("On the 4th day of April1495 my dear Timoteo left me. May God grant him all happiness and goodfortune!")

[Illustration: _The Baptism of Christ. Gallery of the Capitol, Rome.From a Photograph by Anderson._]

There is one reason that makes it doubly difficult, relying ondevelopments of style only, to make, even tentatively, a chronologicalarrangement of Titian's early works. This is that in those painted_poesie_ of the earlier Venetian art of which the germs are to be foundin Giovanni Bellini and Cima, but the flower is identified withGiorgione, Titian surrendered himself to the overmastering influence ofthe latter with less reservation of his own individuality than in hissacred works. In the earlier imaginative subjects the vivifying glow ofGiorgionesque poetry moulds, colours, and expands the genius of Titian,but so naturally as neither to obliterate nor to constrain it. Indeed,even in the late time of our master--checking an unveiled sensuousnesswhich sometimes approaches dangerously near to a downrightsensuality--the influence of the master and companion who vanished halfa century before victoriously reasserts itself. It is this _renouveau_of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged Titian that gives soexquisite a charm to the _Venere del Pardo_, so strange a pathos to thatstill later _Nymph and Shepherd,_ which was a few years ago brought outof its obscurity and added to the treasures of the Imperial Gallery atVienna.

The sacred works of the early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with adifference. Here from the very beginning there are to be noted amajestic placidity, a fulness of life, a splendour of representation,very different from the tremulous sweetness, the spirit of aloofness andreserve which informs such creations as the _Madonna of Castelfranco_and the _Madonna with St. Francis and St. Roch_ of the Prado Museum.Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesqueideal, the overpowering force and majesty of the _Assunta_, the truepassion going hand-in-hand with beauty of the Louvre _Entombment_, therhetorical passion and scenic magnificence of the _St. Peter Martyr_.

The _Baptism of Christ_, with Zuanne Ram as donor, now in the Gallery ofthe Capitol at Rome, had been by Crowe and Cavalcaselle taken away fromTitian and given to Paris Bordone, but the keen insight of Morelli ledhim to restore it authoritatively, and once for all, to Titian. Internalevidence is indeed conclusive in this case that the picture must beassigned to a date when Bordone was but a child of tender years.[15]Here Titian is found treating this great scene in the life of Christmore in the style of a Giorgionesque pastoral than in the solemnhieratic fashion adopted by his great predecessors and contemporaries.The luxuriant landscape is in the main Giorgionesque, save that here andthere a naked branch among the leafage--and on one of them thewoodpecker--strongly recalls Giovanni Bellini. The same robust,round-limbed young Venetian, with the inexpressive face, does duty hereas St. John the Baptist, who in the _Three Ages_, presently to bediscussed, appears much more appropriately as the amorous shepherd. TheChrist, here shown in the flower of youthful manhood, with luxurianthair and softly curling beard, will mature later on into the divine_Cristo della Moneta_. The question at once arises here, Did Titian inthe type of this figure derive inspiration from Giovanni Bellini'ssplendid _Baptism of Christ_, finished in 1510 for the Church of S.Corona at Vicenza, but which the younger artist might well have seen ayear or two previously, while it was in the course of execution in theworkshop of the venerable master? Apart from its fresh naivete, and itsrare pictorial charm, how trivial and merely anecdotic does theconception of Titian appear by the side of that of Bellini, so lofty, soconsoling in its serene beauty, in the solemnity of its sunsetcolour![16] Alone in the profile portrait of the donor, Zuanne Ram,placed in the picture with an awkwardness attractive in its naivete,but superbly painted, is Titian already a full-grown master standingalone.

The beautiful _Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida,_ placed inthe Sala de la Reina Isabel of the Prado, is now at last officiallyrestored to Titian, after having been for years innumerable ascribed toGiorgione, whose style it not more than generally recalls. Here at anyrate all the rival wise men are agreed, and it only remains for thestudent of the old masters, working to-day on the solid substructureprovided for him by his predecessors, to wonder how any otherattribution could have been accepted. But then the critic of the presentday is a little too prone to be wise and scornful _a ban marche_,forgetting that he has been spared three parts of the road, and that hestarts for conquest at the high point, to reach which the pioneers ofscientific criticism in art have devoted a lifetime of noble toil. It isin this piece especially that we meet with that element in the early artof the Cadorine which Crowe and Cavalcaselle have defined as"Palmesque." The _St. Bridget_ and the _St. Ulphus_ are both typesfrequently to be met with in the works of the Bergamasque painter, andit has been more than once remarked that the same beautiful model withhair of wavy gold must have sat to Giorgione, Titian, and Palma. Thiscan only be true, however, in a modified sense, seeing that Giorgionedid not, so much as his contemporaries and followers, affect the type ofthe beautiful Venetian blond, "large, languishing, and lazy." The hairof his women--both the sacred personages and the divinities nominallyclassic or wholly Venetian--is, as a rule, of a rich chestnut, or at themost dusky fair, and in them the Giorgionesque oval of the face temperswith its spirituality the strength of physical passion that the generalphysique denotes. The polished surface of this panel at Madrid, theexecution, sound and finished without being finicking, the highyellowish lights on the crimson draperies, are all very characteristicof this, the first manner of Vecelli. The green hangings at the back ofthe picture are such as are very generally associated with thecolour-schemes of Palma. An old repetition, with a slight variation inthe Bambino, is in the royal collection at Hampton Court, where it longbore--indeed it does so still on the frame--the name of Palma Vecchio.

It will be remembered that Vasari assigns to the _Tobias and the Angel_in the Church of S. Marciliano at Venice the exact date 1507, describingit, moreover, with greater accuracy than he does any other work byTitian. He mentions even "the thicket, in which is a St. John theBaptist kneeling as he prays to heaven, whence comes a splendour oflight." The Aretine biographer is followed in this particular byMorelli, usually so eagle-eyed, so little bound by tradition in tracingthe beginnings of a great painter. The gifted modern critic places thepicture among the quite early works of our master. Notwithstanding thisweight of authority, the writer feels bound to dissent from the viewjust now indicated, and in this instance to follow Crowe andCavalcaselle, who assign to the _Tobias and the Angel_ a place muchlater on in Titian's long career. The picture, though it hangs high inthe little church for which it was painted, will speak for itself tothose who interrogate it without _parti pris_. Neither in thefigures--the magnificently classic yet living archangel Raphael and themore naive and realistic Tobias--nor in the rich landscape with St. Johnthe Baptist praying is there anything left of the early Giorgionesquemanner. In the sweeping breadth of the execution, the summarising powerof the brush, the glow from within of the colour, we have so manyevidences of a style in its fullest maturity. It will be safe,therefore, to place the picture well on in Titian's middle period.[17]

The _Three Ages_ in the Bridgewater Gallery and the so-called _Sacredand Profane Love_ in the Borghese Gallery represent the apogee ofTitian's Giorgionesque style. Glowing through and through with thespirit of the master-poet among Venetian painters, yet falling short alittle, it may be, of that subtle charm of his, compounded indefinablyof sensuous delight and spiritual yearning, these two masterpieces carrythe Giorgionesque technically a pretty wide step farther than theinventor of the style took it. Barbarelli never absolutely threw off thetrammels of the Quattrocento, except in his portraits, but retained tothe last--not as a drawback, but rather as an added charm--the naivete,the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutelyfull-fledged.

The _Three Ages_, from its analogies of type and manner with the_Baptism_ of the Capitol, would appear to be the earlier of the twoimaginative works here grouped together, but to date later than thatpicture.[18] The tonality of the picture is of an exquisitesilveriness--that of clear, moderate daylight, though this relativepaleness may have been somewhat increased by time. It may a littledisconcert at first sight those who have known the lovely pastoral onlyfrom hot, brown copies, such as the one which, under the name ofGiorgione, was formerly in the Dudley House Collection, and now belongsto Sir William Farrer. It is still so difficult to battle with thedeeply-rooted notion that there can be no Giorgione, no painting of hisschool, without the accompaniment of a rich brown sauce! The shepherdesshas a robe of fairest crimson, and her flower-crowned locks in tint morenearly approach to the _blond cendre_ which distinguishes so many ofPalma's _donne_ than to the ruddier gold that Titian himself generallyaffects. The more passionate of the two, she gazes straight into theeyes of her strong-limbed rustic lover, who half-reclining rests hishand upon her shoulder. On the twin reed-pipes, which she still holds inher hands, she has just breathed forth a strain of music, and to it, asit still lingers in their ears, they yield themselves entranced. Herethe youth is naked, the maid clothed and adorned--a reversal, this, ofGiorgione's _Fete Champetre_ in the Salon Carre of the Louvre, where thewomen are undraped, and the amorous young cavaliers appear in completeand rich attire. To the right are a group of thoroughly Titianesqueamorini--the winged one, dominating the others, being perhaps Amorhimself; while in the distance an old man contemplates skulls rangedround him on the ground--obvious reminders of the last stage of all, atwhich he has so nearly arrived. There is here a wonderful unity betweenthe even, unaccented harmony of the delicate tonality and the mood ofthe personages--the one aiding the other to express the moment of pausein nature and in love, which in itself is a delight more deep than allthat the very whirlwind of passion can give. Near at hand may bepitfalls, the smiling love-god may prove less innocent than he looks,and in the distance Fate may be foreshadowed by the figure of weary Ageawaiting Death. Yet this one moment is all the lovers' own, and theyprofane it not by speech, but stir their happy languor only with faintnotes of music borne on the still, warm air.

The _Sacred and Profane Love_ of the Borghese Gallery is one of theworld's pictures, and beyond doubt the masterpiece of the early orGiorgionesque period. To-day surely no one will be found to gainsayMorelli when he places it at the end of that period, which it soincomparably sums up--not at the beginning, when its perfection would beas incomprehensible as the less absolute achievement displayed in otherearly pieces which such a classification as this would place after theBorghese picture. The accompanying reproduction obviates all necessityfor a detailed description. Titian painted afterwards perhaps morewonderfully still--with a more sweeping vigour of brush, with a higherauthority, and a play of light as brilliant and diversified. He neverattained to a higher finish and perfection of its kind, or moreadmirably suited the technical means to the thing to be achieved. Henever so completely gave back, coloured with the splendour of his owngenius, the rays received from Giorgione. The delicious sunset landscapehas all the Giorgionesque elements, with more spaciousness, and lines ofa still more suave harmony. The grand Venetian _donna_ who sitssumptuously robed, flower-crowned, and even gloved, at the sculpturedclassic fount is the noblest in her pride of loveliness, as she is oneof the first, of the long line of voluptuous beauties who will occupythe greatest brushes of the Cinquecento. The little love-god who,insidiously intervening, paddles in the water of the fountain andtroubles its surface, is Titian's very own, owing nothing to anyforerunner. The divinely beautiful _Profane Love_--or, as we shallpresently see, _Venus_--is the most flawless presentment of femaleloveliness unveiled that modern art has known up to this date, save onlythe _Venus_ of Giorgione himself (in the Dresden Gallery), to which itcan be but little posterior. The radiant freshness of the face, with itsglory of half-unbound hair, does not, indeed, equal the sovereignloveliness of the Dresden _Venus_ or the disquieting charm of theGiovanelli _Zingarella_ (properly Hypsipyle). Its beauty is all on thesurface, while theirs stimulates the imagination of the beholder. Thebody with its strong, supple beauty, its unforced harmony of line andmovement, with its golden glow of flesh, set off in the trueGiorgionesque fashion by the warm white of the slender, diaphanousdrapery, by the splendid crimson mantle with the changing hues and highlights, is, however, the most perfect poem of the human body that Titianever achieved. Only in the late _Venere del Pardo_, which so closelyfollows the chief motive of Giorgione's _Venus_, does he approach it infrankness and purity. Far more genuinely classic is it in spirit,because more living and more solidly founded on natural truth, thananything that the Florentine or Roman schools, so much more assiduous intheir study of classical antiquity, have brought forth.[19]

[Illustration: _Sacred and Profane Love._]

It is impossible to discuss here in detail all the conjecturalexplanations which have been hazarded with regard to this most popularof all Venetian pictures--least of all that strange one brought forwardby Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the _Artless and Sated Love_, for which theyhave found so little acceptance. But we may no longer wrap ourselves inan atmosphere of dreamy conjecture and show but a languid desire tosolve the fascinating problem. Taking as his starting-point the picturesdescribed by Marcantonio Michiel (the _Anonimo_ of Jacopo Morelli), inthe house of Messer Taddeo Contarini of Venice, as the _Inferno withAeneas and Anchises_ and _Landscape with the Birth of Paris_, Herr FranzWickhoff[20] has proceeded, we have seen, to rename, with a daringcrowned by a success nothing short of surprising, several ofBarbarelli's best known works. The _Three Philosophers_ he calls_Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas_, the Giovanelli _Tempest with the Gipsyand the Soldier_ he explains anew as _Admetus and Hypsipyle_.[21] Thesubject known to us in an early plate of Marcantonio Raimondi, andpopularly called, or rather miscalled, the _Dream of Raphael_, isrecognised by Herr Wickhoff as having its root in the art of Giorgione.He identifies the mysterious subject with one cited by Servius, thecommentator of Virgil, who relates how, when two maidens were sleepingside by side in the Temple of the Penates at Lavinium (as he puts it),the unchaste one was killed by lightning, while the other remained inpeaceful sleep.

Passing over to the Giorgionesque period of Titian, he boldly sets towork on the world-famous _Sacred and Profane Love_, and shows us theCadorine painter interpreting, at the suggestion of some learnedhumanist at his elbow, an incident in the Seventh Book of the_Argonautica_ of Valerius Flaccus--that wearisome imitation of thesimilarly named epic of Apollonius Rhodius. Medea--the sumptuouslyattired dame who does duty as Sacred Love(!)--sits at the fountain inunrestful self-communing, leaning one arm on a mysterious casket, andholding in her right hand a bunch of wonder-working herbs. She will notyield to her new-born love for the Greek enemy Jason, because this loveis the most shameful treason to father and people. But to her comesVenus in the form of the sorceress Circe, the sister of Medea's father,irresistibly pleading that she shall go to the alien lover, who waits inthe wood. It is the vain resistance of Medea, hopelessly caught in thetoils of love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist, it is thesubtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible--in Titian's realisationof the legend--to the woman she tempts, that constitute the main themeupon which Titian has built his masterpiece. Moritz Thausing[22] hadalready got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when hedescribed the Borghese picture as _The Maiden with Venus and Amor at theWell_. The _vraisemblance_ of Herr Wickhoff's brilliant interpretationbecomes the greater when we reflect that Titian at least twiceafterwards borrowed subjects from classical antiquity, taking his_Worship of Venus_, now at Madrid, from the _Erotes_ of Philostratus,and our own wonderful _Bacchus and Ariadne_ at the National Gallery fromthe _Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ of Catullus. In the future it isquite possible that the Austrian savant may propose new and preciseinterpretations for the _Three Ages_ and for Giorgione's _ConcertChampetre_ at the Louvre.

[Illustration: _Herodias with the Head of John the Baptist. DoriaGallery, Rome. From the Replica in the Collection of R.H. Benson, Esq._]

It is no use disguising the fact that, grateful as the true student ofItalian art must be for such guidance as is here given, it comes to himat first as a shock that these mysterious creations of the ardent youngpoet-painters, in the presence of which we have most of us so willinglyallowed reason and argument to stand in abeyance, should thus have hard,clear lines drawn, as it were, round their deliciously vague contours.It is their very vagueness and strangeness, the atmosphere of pause andquiet that they bring with them, the way in which they indefinably takepossession of the beholder, body and soul, that above and beyond theirradiant beauty have made them dear to successive generations. And yet weneed not mourn overmuch, or too painfully set to work to revise ourwhole conception of Venetian idyllic art as matured in the first yearsof the Cinquecento. True, some humanist of the type of Pietro Bembo, notless amorous than learned and fastidious, must have found for Titian andGiorgione all these fine stories from Virgil, Catullus, Statius, and thelesser luminaries of antique poetry, which luckily for the world theyhave interpreted in their own fashion. The humanists themselves would nodoubt have preferred the more laborious and at the same time morefantastic Florentine fashion of giving plastic form in every particularto their elaborate symbolisms, their artificial conceits, their classiclegends. But we may unfeignedly rejoice that the Venetian painters ofthe golden prime disdained to represent--or it may be unconsciouslyshrank from representing--the mere dramatic moment, the mere dramaticand historical character of a subject thus furnished to them. Giorgioneembodies in such a picture as the _Adrastus and Hypsipyle_, or the_Aeneas and Evander_, not so much what has been related to him of thoseancient legends as his own mood when he is brought into contact withthem; he transposes his motive from a dramatic into a lyricalatmosphere, and gives it forth anew, transformed into something "richand strange," coloured for ever with his own inspired yet so warmlyhuman fantasy. Titian, in the _Sacred and Profane Love_, as foridentification we must still continue to call it, strives to keep closeto the main lines of his story, in this differing from Giorgione. Butfor all that, his love for the rich beauty of the Venetian country, forthe splendour of female loveliness unveiled, for the piquant contrast offemale loveliness clothed and sumptuously adorned, has conquered. He haspresented the Romanised legend of the fair Colchian sorceress in such adelightfully misleading fashion that it has taken all these centuries todecipher its true import. What Giorgione and Titian in these exquisiteidylls--for so we may still dare to call them--have consciously orunconsciously achieved, is the indissoluble union of humanity outwardlyquiescent, yet pulsating with an inner life and passion, to theenvironing nature. It is Nature herself that in these true painted poemsmysteriously responds, that interprets to the beholder the moods of man,much as a mighty orchestra--Nature ordered and controlled--may by itsundercurrent explain to him who knows how to listen what the verypersonages of the drama may not proclaim aloud for themselves. And so wemay be deeply grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his new interpretations,not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a firstacquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our oldideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art fromanother and a more prosaic, because a more precise and literal,standpoint.

Frescoes of the Scuola del Santo--The "Herodias" type of picture--HolyFamilies and Sacred Conversations--Date of the "Cristo della Moneta" Isthe "Concert" of the Pitti by Titian?--The "Bacchanal" of AlnwickCastle.

It has been pointed out by Titian's biographers that the wars whichfollowed upon the League of Cambrai had the effect of dispersing allover North Italy the chief Venetian artists of the younger generation.It was not long after this--on the death of his master Giorgione--thatSebastiano Luciani migrated to Rome and, so far as he could, shook offhis allegiance to the new Venetian art; it was then that Titiantemporarily left the city of his adoption to do work in fresco at Paduaand Vicenza. If the date 1508, given by Vasari for the great frieze-likewood-engraving, _The Triumph of Faith_, be accepted, it must be heldthat it was executed before the journey to Padua. Ridolfi[23] citespainted compositions of the _Triumph_ as either the originals or therepetitions of the wood-engravings, for which Titian himself drew theblocks. The frescoes themselves, if indeed Titian carried them out onthe walls of his house at Padua, as has been suggested, have perished;but that they ever came into existence there would not appear to be anydirect evidence. The types, though broadened and coarsened in theprocess of translation into wood-engraving, are not materially atvariance with those in the frescoes of the Scuola del Santo. But themovement, the spirit of the whole is essentially different. This mighty,onward-sweeping procession, with Adam and Eve, the Patriarchs, theProphets and Sibyls, the martyred Innocents, the great chariot withChrist enthroned, drawn by the four Doctors of the Church and impelledforward by the Emblems of the four Evangelists, with a great company ofApostles and Martyrs following, has all the vigour and elasticity, allthe decorative amplitude that is wanting in the frescoes of the Santo.It is obvious that inspiration was derived from the _Triumphs_ ofMantegna, then already so widely popularised by numerous engravings.Titian and those under whose inspiration he worked here obviouslyintended an antithesis to the great series of canvases presenting theapotheosis of Julius Caesar, which were then to be seen in the not fardistant Mantua. Have we here another pictorial commentary, like thefamous _Cristo detta Moneta,_ with which we shall have to dealpresently, on the "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo," whichwas the favourite device of Alfonso of Ferrara and the legend round hisgold coins? The whole question is interesting, and deserves more carefulconsideration than can be accorded to it on the present occasion. Hardlyagain, until he reached extreme old age, did such an impulse of sacredpassion colour the art of the painter of Cadore as here. In the earliersection of his life-work the _Triumph of Faith_ constitutes a strikingexception.

[Illustration: _St. Anthony of Padua causing a new-born Infant to speak.Fresco in the Scuola del Santo, Padua. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]

Passing over, as relatively unimportant, Titian's share in themuch-defaced fresco decorations of the Scuola del Carmine, we come nowto those more celebrated ones in the Scuola del Santo. Out of thesixteen frescoes executed in 1510-11 by Titian, in concert with DomenicoCampagnola and other assistants of less fame, the following three arefrom the brush of the master himself:--_St. Anthony causes a new-bornInfant to speak, testifying to the innocence of its Mother; St. Anthonyheals the leg of a Youth; A jealous Husband puts to death his Wife, whomthe Saint afterwards restores to life._ Here the figures, thecomposition, the beautiful landscape backgrounds bear unmistakably thetrace of Giorgione's influence. The composition has just the timidity,the lack of rhythm and variety, that to the last marks that ofBarbarelli. The figures have his naive truth, his warmth and splendourof life, but not his gilding touch of spirituality to lift theuninspiring subjects a little above the actual. The _Nobleman putting todeath his Wife_ is dramatic, almost terrible in its fierce, awkwardrealism, yet it does not rise much higher in interpretation than whatour neighbours would to-day call the _drame passionel._ The interest ismuch the same that is aroused in a student of Elizabethan literature bythat study of murder, _Arden of Feversham_, not that higher attractionthat he feels--horrors notwithstanding--for _The Maid's Tragedy_ ofBeaumont and Fletcher, or _The Duchess of Malfi_ of Webster.[24]

[Illustration: _"Noli me tangere." National Gallery. From a Photographpublished by the Autotype Company._]

A convenient date for the magnificent _St. Mark enthroned, with SS.Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas, and Damianus_, is 1512, when Titian, havingcompleted his share of the work at the Scuola del Santo, returned toVenice. True, it is still thoroughly Giorgionesque, except in thetruculent _St. Mark_; but, then, as essentially so were the frescoesjust terminated. The noble altar-piece[25] symbolises, or rathercommemorates, the steadfastness of the State face to face with theterrors of the League of Cambrai:--on the one side St. Sebastian,standing, perhaps, for martyrdom by superior force of arms, St. Roch forplague (the plague of Venice in 1510); on the other, SS. Cosmas andDamianus, suggesting the healing of these evils. The colour isGiorgionesque in that truer sense in which Barbarelli's own is so to bedescribed. Especially does it show points of contact with that of theso-called _Three Philosophers_, which, on the authority of MarcantonioMichiel (the _Anonimo_), is rightly or wrongly held to be one of thelast works of the Castelfranco master. That is to say, it is bothsumptuous and boldly contrasted in the local hues, the sovereign unityof general tone not being attained by any sacrifice or attenuation, byany undue fusion of these, as in some of the second-rate Giorgionesques.Common to both is the use of a brilliant scarlet, which Giorgionesuccessfully employs in the robe of the Trojan Aeneas, and Titian on amore extensive scale in that of one of the healing saints. These lastare among the most admirable portrait-figures in the life-work ofTitian. In them a simplicity, a concentration akin to that of GiovanniBellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity andflexibility of Barbarelli. The St. Sebastian is the most beautiful amongthe youthful male figures, as the _Venus_ of Giorgione and the Venus ofthe _Sacred and Profane Love_ are the most beautiful among the femalefigures to be found in the Venetian art of a century in which suchpresentments of youth in its flower abounded. There is somethingandrogynous, in the true sense of the word, in the union of the strengthand pride of lusty youth with a grace which is almost feminine in itssuavity, yet not offensively effeminate. It should be noted that adelight in portraying the fresh comeliness, the elastic beauty of formproper to the youth just passing into the man was common to manyVenetian painters at this stage, and coloured their art as it hadcoloured the whole art of Greece.

Hereabouts the writer would like to place the singularly attractive, yeta little puzzling, _Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd_,which is No. 4 in the National Gallery. The type of the landscape isearly, and even for that time the execution in this particular is, forTitian, curiously small and wanting in breadth. Especially theprojecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled againstthe sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes. Thenoble type and the stilted attitude of the _St. Joseph_ suggest the _St.Mark_ of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket ofthe thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness ofPalma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in theSalute picture. The unusually pensive Madonna reminds the spectator, bya certain fleshiness and matronly amplitude of proportion, though by nomeans in sentiment, of the sumptuous dames who look on so unconcernedlyin the _St. Anthony causing a new-born Infant to speak_, of the Scuola.Her draperies show, too, the jagged breaks and close parallel folds ofthe early time before complete freedom of design was attained.

[Illustration: _St. Mark enthroned, with four Saints. S. Maria dellaSalute, Venice. From a Photograph by Anderson_.]

[Illustration: _The Madonna with the Cherries. Imperial Gallery, Vienna.From a Photograph by Loewy_.]

The splendidly beautiful _Herodias with the head of St. John theBaptist_, in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone, but byMorelli definitively placed among the Giorgionesque works of Titian,belongs to about the same time as the _Sacred and Profane Love_, andwould therefore come in rather before than after the sojourn at Paduaand Vicenza. The intention has been not so much to emphasise the tragiccharacter of the motive as to exhibit to the highest advantage thevoluptuous charm, the languid indifference of a Venetian beauty posingfor Herod's baleful consort. Repetitions of this _Herodias_ exist in theNorthbrook Collection and in that of Mr. R.H. Benson. The latter, whichis presumably from the workshop of the master, and shows variations inone or two unimportant particulars from the Doria picture, is here,failing the original, reproduced with the kind permission of the owner.A conception traceable back to Giorgione would appear to underlie, notonly this Doria picture, but that _Herodias_ which at Dorchester Houseis, for not obvious reasons, attributed to Pordenone, and anothersimilar one by Palma Vecchio, of which a late copy exists in thecollection of the Earl of Chichester. Especially is this community oforigin noticeable in the head of St. John on the charger, as it appearsin each of these works. All of them again show a family resemblance inthis particular respect to the interesting full-length _Judith_ at theHermitage, now ascribed to Giorgione, to the over-painted half-length_Judith_ in the Querini-Stampalia Collection at Venice, and to Hollar'sprint after a picture supposed by the engraver to give the portrait ofGiorgione himself in the character of David, the slayer of Goliath.[26]The sumptuous but much-injured _Vanitas_, which is No. 1110 in the AltePinakothek of Munich--a beautiful woman of the same opulent type as the_Herodias_, holding a mirror which reflects jewels and other symbols ofearthly vanity--may be classed with the last-named work. Again we owe itto Morelli[27] that this painting, ascribed by Crowe andCavalcaselle--as the _Herodias_ was ascribed--to Pordenone, has beenwith general acceptance classed among the early works of Titian. Thepopular _Flora_ of the Uffizi, a beautiful thing still, though all thebloom of its beauty has been effaced, must be placed rather later inthis section of Titian's life-work, displaying as it does a techniquemore facile and accomplished, and a conception of a somewhat higherindividuality. The model is surely the same as that which has served forthe Venus of the _Sacred and Profane Love_, though the picture comessome years after that piece. Later still comes the so-called _Alfonsod'Este and Laura Dianti_, as to which something will be said farther on.Another puzzle is provided by the beautiful "_Noli me tangere_" of theNational Gallery, which must necessarily have its place somewhere hereamong the early works. Giorgionesque the picture still is, and mostmarkedly so in the character of the beautiful landscape; yet theexecution shows an altogether unusual freedom and mastery for thatperiod. The _Magdalen_ is, appropriately enough, of the same type as theexquisite, golden blond courtezans--or, if you will, models--whoconstantly appear and reappear in this period of Venetian art. Hardlyanywhere has the painter exhibited a more wonderful freedom and subtletyof brush than in the figure of the Christ, in which glowing flesh is sofinely set off by the white of fluttering, half-transparent draperies.The canvas has exquisite colour, almost without colours; the only localtint of any very defined character being the dark red of the Magdalen'srobe. Yet a certain affectation, a certain exaggeration of flutteringmovement and strained attitude repel the beholder a little at first, andneutralise for him the rare beauties of the canvas. It is as if a waveof some strange transient influence had passed over Titian at thismoment, then again to be dissipated.

[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with St. John and St. Anthony Abbot.Uffizi Gallery, Florence. From a Photograph by Brogi._]

But to turn now once more to the series of our master's Holy Familiesand Sacred Conversations which began with _La Zingarella_, and wascontinued with the _Virgin and Child with SS. Ulfo and Brigida_ ofMadrid. The most popular of all those belonging to this still early timeis the _Virgin with the Cherries_ in the Vienna Gallery. Here thepainter is already completely himself. He will go much farther inbreadth if not in polish, in transparency, in forcefulness, if not inattractiveness of colour; but he is now, in sacred art at any rate,practically free from outside influences. For the pensive girl-Madonnaof Giorgione we now have the radiant young matron of Titian, joyous yetcalm in her play with the infant Christ, while the Madonna of his masterand friend was unrestful and full of tender foreboding even in seemingrepose. Pretty close on this must have followed the _Madonna and Childwith St. Stephen, St. Ambrose and St. Maurice_, No 439 in the Louvre, inwhich the rich colour-harmonies strike a somewhat deeper note. Anatelier repetition of this fine original is No. 166 in the ViennaGallery; the only material variation traceable in this last-namedexample being that in lieu of St. Ambrose, wearing a kind of biretta, wehave St. Jerome bareheaded.

Very near in time and style to this particular series, with which it maysafely be grouped, is the beautiful and finely preserved _Holy Family_in the Bridgewater Gallery, where it is still erroneously attributed toPalma Vecchio. It is to be found in the same private apartment on thegroundfloor of Bridgewater House, that contains the _Three Ages_. Deepglowing richness of colour and smooth perfection without smallness offinish make this picture remarkable, notwithstanding its lack of anydeeper significance. Nor must there be forgotten in an enumeration ofthe early Holy Families, one of the loveliest of all, the _Madonna andChild with the infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot_, which adorns theVenetian section of the Uffizi Gallery. Here the relationship toGiorgione is more clearly shown than in any of these Holy Families ofthe first period, and in so far the painting, which cannot be placedvery early among them, constitutes a partial exception in the series.The Virgin is of a more refined and pensive type than in the _Madonnawith the Cherries_ of Vienna, or the _Madonna with Saints_, No. 439 inthe Louvre, and the divine Bambino less robust in build and aspect. Themagnificent St. Anthony is quite Giorgionesque in the serenity tingedwith sadness of his contemplative mood.

[Illustration: From a photograph by Brauen-Clement & Cie. Virgin andChild with Saints.]

Last of all in this particular group--another work in respect of whichMorelli has played the rescuer--is the _Madonna and Child with fourSaints_, No. 168 in the Dresden Gallery, a much-injured but eminentlyTitianesque work, which may be said to bring this particular series towithin a couple of years or so of the _Assunta_--that great landmark ofthe first period of maturity. The type of the Madonna here is still verysimilar to that in the _Madonna with the Cherries_.

[Illustration: _St. Eustace (or St. Hubert) with the Miracle of theStag. From a Drawing by Titian in the British Museum._]

Apart from all these sacred works, and in every respect an exceptionalproduction, is the world-famous _Cristo della Moneta_ of the DresdenGallery. As to the exact date to be assigned to this panel among theearly works of Titian considerable difficulty exists. For once agreeingwith Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Morelli is inclined to disregard thetestimony of Vasari, from whose text it would result that it was paintedin or after the year 1514, and to place it as far back as 1508.Notwithstanding this weight of authority the writer is stronglyinclined, following Vasari in this instance, and trusting to certainindications furnished by the picture itself, to return to the date 1514or thereabouts. There is no valid reason to doubt that the _Christ ofthe Tribute-Money_ was painted for Alfonso I. of Ferrara, and the lessso, seeing that it so aptly illustrates the already quoted legend on hiscoins: "Quod est Caesaris Caesari, quod est Dei Deo." According toVasari, it was painted _nella porta d'un armario_--that is to say, inthe door of a press or wardrobe. But this statement need not be taken inits most literal sense. If it were to be assumed from this passage thatthe picture was painted on the spot, its date must be advanced to 1516,since Titian did not pay his first visit to Ferrara before that year.There is no sufficient ground, however, for assuming that he did notexecute his wonderful panel in the usual fashion--that is to say, athome in Venice. The last finishing touches might, perhaps, have beengiven to it _in situ_, as they were to Bellini's _Bacchanal_, done alsofor the Duke of Ferrara. The extraordinary finish of the painting, whichis hardly to be paralleled in this respect in the life-work of theartist, may have been due to his desire to "show his hand" to his newpatron in a subject which touched him so nearly. And then the finish isnot of the Quattrocento type, not such as we find, for instance, in the_Leonardo Loredano_ of Giovanni Bellini, the finest panels of Cima, orthe early _Christ bearing the Cross_ of Giorgione. In it exquisitepolish of surface and consummate rendering of detail are combined withthe utmost breadth and majesty of composition, with a now perfectfreedom in the casting of the draperies. It is difficult, indeed, toimagine that this masterpiece--so eminently a work of the Cinquecento,and one, too, in which the master of Cadore rose superior to allinfluences, even to that of Giorgione--could have been painted in 1508,that is some two years before Bellini's _Baptism of Christ_ in S.Corona, and in all probability before the _Three Philosophers_ ofGiorgione himself. The one of Titian's own early pictures with which itappears to the writer to have most in common--not so much in technique,indeed, as in general style--is the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, and thanthis it is very much less Giorgionesque. To praise the _Cristo dellaMoneta_ anew after it has been so incomparably well praised seems almostan impertinence. The soft radiance of the colour so well matches thetempered majesty, the infinite mansuetude of the conception; thespirituality, which is of the essence of the august subject, is sohappily expressed, without any sensible diminution of the splendour ofRenaissance art approaching its highest. And yet nothing could well besimpler than the scheme of colour as compared with the complex harmonieswhich Venetian art in a somewhat later phase affected. Frank contrastsare established between the tender, glowing flesh of the Christ, seen inall the glory of achieved manhood, and the coarse, brown skin of the sonof the people who appears as the Pharisee; between the bright yettempered red of His robe and the deep blue of His mantle. But the goldenglow, which is Titian's own, envelops the contrasting figures and thecontrasting hues in its harmonising atmosphere, and gives unity to thewhole.[28]

A small group of early portraits--all of them somewhat difficult toplace--call for attention before we proceed. Probably the earliestportrait among those as yet recognised as from the hand of ourpainter--leaving out of the question the _Baffo_ and theportrait-figures in the great _St. Mark_ of the Salute--is themagnificent _Ariosto_ in the Earl of Darnley's Collection at CobhamHall.[29] There is very considerable doubt, to say the least, as towhether this half-length really represents the court poet of Ferrara,but the point requires more elaborate discussion than can be hereconceded to it. Thoroughly Giorgionesque is the soberly tinted yetsumptuous picture in its general arrangement, as in its general tone,and in this respect it is the fitting companion and the descendant ofGiorgione's _Antonio Broccardo_ at Buda-Pesth, of his _Knight of Malta_at the Uffizi. Its resemblance, moreover, is, as regards the generallines of the composition, a very striking one to the celebrated Sciarra_Violin-Player_ by Sebastiano del Piombo, now in the gallery of BaronAlphonse Rothschild at Paris, where it is as heretofore given toRaphael.[30] The handsome, manly head has lost both subtlety andcharacter through some too severe process of cleaning, but Venetian arthas hardly anything more magnificent to show than the costume, with thequilted sleeve of steely, blue-grey satin which occupies so prominent aplace in the picture.

[Illustration: _Madonna and Child, with four Saints. Dresden Gallery.From a Photograph by Hanfstaengl_.]

The so-called _Concert_ of the Pitti Palace, which depicts a youngAugustinian monk as he plays on a keyed instrument, having on one sideof him a youthful cavalier in a plumed hat, on the other a bareheadedclerk holding a bass-viol, was, until Morelli arose, almost universallylooked upon as one of the most typical Giorgiones.[31] The most giftedof the purely aesthetic critics who have approached the ItalianRenaissance, Walter Pater, actually built round this _Concert_ hisexquisite study on the School of Giorgione. There can be little doubt,notwithstanding, that Morelli was right in denying the authorship ofBarbarelli, and tentatively, for he does no more, assigning the sosubtly attractive and pathetic _Concert_ to the early time of Titian. Toexpress a definitive opinion on the latter point in the present state ofthe picture would be somewhat hazardous. The portrait of the modishyoung cavalier and that of the staid elderly clerk, whose baldnessrenders tonsure impossible--that is just those portions of the canvaswhich are least well preserved--are also those that least conclusivelysuggest our master. The passion-worn, ultra-sensitive physiognomy of theyoung Augustinian is, undoubtedly, in its very essence a Giorgionesquecreation, for the fellows of which we must turn to the Castelfrancomaster's just now cited _Antonio Broccardo_, to his male portraits inBerlin and at the Uffizi, to his figure of the youthful Pallas, son ofEvander, in the _Three Philosophers_. Closer to it, all the same, arethe _Raffo_ and the two portraits in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, andcloser still is the supremely fine _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the SalonCarre, that later production of Vecelli's early time. The _Concert_ ofthe Pitti, so far as it can be judged through the retouches that coverit, displays an art certainly not finer or more delicate, but yet in itstechnical processes broader, swifter, and more synthetic than anythingthat we can with certainty point to in the life-work of Barbarelli. Thelarge but handsome and flexible hands of the player are much nearer intype and treatment to Titian than they are to his master. The beautifulmotive--music for one happy moment uniting by invisible bonds ofsympathy three human beings--is akin to that in the _Three Ages_, thoughthere love steps in as the beautifier of rustic harmony. It is to befound also in Giorgione's _Concert Champetre_, in the Louvre, in whichthe thrumming of the lute is, however, one among many delights appealingto the senses. This smouldering heat, this tragic passion in which youthrevels, looking back already with discontent, yet forward also withunquenchable yearning, is the keynote of the Giorgionesque and the earlyTitianesque male portraiture. It is summed up by the _Antonio Broccardo_of the first, by the _Jeune Homme au Gant_ of the second. Altogetherother, and less due to a reaction from physical ardour, is the exquisitesensitiveness of Lorenzo Lotto, who sees most willingly in his sittersthose qualities that are in the closest sympathy with his ownhighly-strung nature, and loves to present them as some secret,indefinable woe tears at their heart-strings. A strong element of theGiorgionesque pathos informs still and gives charm to the Sciarra_Violin-Player_ of Sebastiano del Piombo; only that there it is alreadytempered by the haughty self-restraint more proper to Florentine andRoman portraiture. There is little or nothing to add after this as tothe _Jeune Homme au Gant_, except that as a representation ofaristocratic youth it has hardly a parallel among the master's worksexcept, perhaps, a later and equally admirable, though lessdistinguished, portrait in the Pitti.

Not until Van Dyck, refining upon Rubens under the example of theVenetians, painted in the _pensieroso_ mood his portraits of high-bredEnglish cavaliers in all the pride of adolescence or earliest manhood,was this particular aspect of youth in its flower again depicted withthe same felicity.[32]

To Crowe and Cavalcaselle's pages the reader must be referred for adetailed and interesting account of Titian's intrigues against thevenerable Giovanni Bellini in connection with the Senseria, or office ofbroker, to the merchants of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. We see there how,on the death of the martial pontiff, Julius the Second, Pietro Bemboproposed to Titian to take service with the new Medici Pope, Leo theTenth (Giovanni de' Medici), and how Navagero dissuaded him from such astep. Titian, making the most of his own magnanimity, proceeds topetition the Doge and Signori for the first vacant broker's patent forlife, on the same conditions and with the same charges and exemptions asare conceded to Giovanni Bellini. The petition is presented on the 31stof May 1513, and the Council of Ten on that day moves and carries aresolution accepting Titian's offer with all the conditions attached.Though he has arrived at the extreme limit of his splendid career, oldGian Bellino, who has just given new proof of his still transcendentpower in the great altar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo (1513), whichis in some respects the finest of all his works, declines to sit stillunder the encroachments of his dangerous competitor, younger thanhimself by half a century. On the 24th of March 1514 the Council of Tenrevokes its decree of the previous May, and formally declares thatTitian is not to receive his broker's patent on the first vacancy, butmust wait his turn. Seemingly nothing daunted, Titian petitions again,asking for the reversion of the particular broker's patent which willbecome vacant on the death of Giovanni Bellini; and this new offer,which stipulates for certain special payments and provisions, isaccepted by the Council. Titian, like most other holders of themuch-coveted office, shows himself subsequently much more eager toreceive its not inconsiderable emoluments than to finish the pictures,the painting of which is the one essential duty attached to the office.Some further bargaining takes place with the Council on the 18th ofJanuary 1516, but, a few days after the death of Giovanni Bellini at theend of November in the same year, fresh resolutions are passedpostponing the grant to Titian of Bellini's patent; notwithstandingwhich, there is conclusive evidence of a later date to show that he isallowed the full enjoyment of his "Senseria in Fontego di Tedeschi"(_sic_), with all its privileges and immunities, before the close ofthis same year, 1516.

[Illustration: _Portrait of a Man. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. From aPhotograph by Hanfstaengl_.]

It is in this year that Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, andentered into relations with Alfonso I., which were to become moreintimate as the position of the master became greater and moreuniversally recognised in Italy. It was here, as we may safely assume,that he completed, or, it may be, repaired, Giovanni Bellini's lastpicture, the great _Bacchanal_ or _Feast of the Gods on Earth_, now atAlnwick Castle. It is there that he obtained the commission for twofamous works, the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, designed, incontinuation of the series commenced with Bellini's _Feast of the Gods_,to adorn a favourite apartment in Alfonso's castle of Ferrara; theseries being completed a little later on by that crown and climax of thewhole set, the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ of the National Gallery.

Bellini appears in an unfamiliar phase in this final production of hismagnificent old age, on which the signature, together with the date,1514, so carefully noted by Vasari, is still most distinctly to be read.Much less Giorgionesque--if the term be in this case permissible--andmore Quattrocentist in style than in the immediately precedingaltar-piece of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, he is here hardly lessinteresting. All admirers of his art are familiar with the fourbeautiful _Allegories_ of the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Venice,which constitute, besides the present picture, almost his sole excursioninto the regions of pagan mythology and symbolism. These belong,however, to a considerably earlier period of his maturity, and show afire which in the _Bacchanal_ has died out.[33] Vasari describes this_Bacchanal_ as "one of the most beautiful works ever executed by GianBellino," and goes on to remark that it has in the draperies "a certainangular (or cutting) quality in accordance with the German style." Hestrangely attributes this to an imitation of Duerer's _Rosenkranzfest_,painted some eight years previously for the Church of San Bartolommeo,adjacent to the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. This particularity, noted by theauthor of the _Vite_, and, in some passages, a certain hardness andopacity of colour, give rise to the surmise that, even in the parts ofthe picture which belong to Bellini, the co-operation of Basaiti may betraced. It was he who most probably painted the background and thefigure of St. Jerome in the master's altar-piece finished in thepreceding year for S. Giovanni Crisostomo; it was he, too, who to agreat extent executed, though he cannot have wholly devised, theBellinesque _Madonna in Glory with Eight Saints_ in the Church of SanPietro Martire at Murano, which belongs to this exact period. Even inthe _Madonna_ of the Brera Gallery (1510), which shows Gian Bellino'sfinest landscape of the late time, certain hardnesses of colour in themain group suggest the possibility of a minor co-operation by Basaiti.Some passages of the _Bacchanal_, however--especially the figures of thetwo blond, fair-breasted goddesses or nymphs who, in a break in thetrees, stand relieved against the yellow bands of a sunset sky--are asbeautiful as anything that Venetian art in its Bellinesque phase hasproduced up to the date of the picture's appearance. Very suggestive ofBellini is the way in which the hair of some of the personages isdressed in heavy formal locks, such as can only be produced byartificial means. These are to be found, no doubt, chiefly in hisearliest or Paduan period, when they are much more defined and rigid.Still this coiffure--for as such it must be designated--is to be foundmore or less throughout the master's career. It is very noticeable inthe _Allegories_ just mentioned.

Infinitely pathetic is the old master's vain attempt to infuse into thechosen subject the measure of Dionysiac vehemence that it requires. Anatmosphere of unruffled peace, a grand serenity, unconsciously betrayinglife-weariness, replaces the amorous unrest that courses like firethrough the veins of his artistic offspring, Giorgione and Titian. Theaudacious gestures and movements naturally belonging to this rusticfestival, in which the gods unbend and, after the homelier fashion ofmortals, rejoice, are indicated; but they are here gone through, itwould seem, only _pour la forme_. A careful examination of the picturesubstantially confirms Vasari's story that the _Feast of the Gods_ waspainted upon by Titian, or to put it otherwise, suggests in manypassages a Titianesque hand. It may well be, at the same time, thatCrowe and Cavalcaselle are right in their conjecture that what theyounger master did was rather to repair injury to the last work of theelder and supplement it by his own than to complete a picture leftunfinished by him. The whole conception, the _charpente_, the contoursof even the landscape are attributable to Bellini. His are thecarefully-defined, naked tree-trunks to the right, with above in thebranches a pheasant, and on a twig, in the immediate foreground of thepicture, a woodpecker; his is the rocky formation of the foreground withits small pebbles.[34] Even the tall, beetling crag, crowned with acastle sunset-lit--so confidently identified with the rock of Cadore andits castle--is Bellinesque in conception, though not in execution. ByTitian, and brushed in with a loose breadth that might be taken tobetray a certain impatience and lack of interest, are the rocks, thecloud-flecked blue sky, the uplands and forest-growth to the left, theupper part of the foliage that caps the hard, round tree-trunks to theright. If it is Titian that we have here, as certainly appears mostprobable, he cannot be deemed to have exerted his full powers incompleting or developing the Bellinesque landscape. The task may well,indeed, have presented itself to him as an uninviting one. There isnothing to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of theexquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the _Three Ages_ and the _Sacredand Profane Love_, while the broader handling suggests rather thetechnical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect whichopens out in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_.

CHAPTER III

The "Worship of Venus" and "Bacchanal" Place in Art of the"Assunta"--The "Bacchus and Ariadne"--So-called Portraits of Alfonso ofFerrara and Laura Dianti--The "St. Sebastian" of Brescia--Altar-piecesat Ancona and in the Vatican--The "Entombment" of the Louvre--The"Madonna di Casa Pesaro"--Place among Titian's works of "St. PeterMartyr."

In the year in which Titian paid his first visit to Ferrara, Ariostobrought out there his first edition of the _Orlando Farioso_.[35] Agreater degree of intimacy between poet and painter has in some quartersbeen presupposed than probably existed at this stage of Titian's career,when his relation to Alfonso and the Ferrarese Court was far from beingas close as it afterwards became. It has accordingly been surmised thatin the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, painted for Alfonso, wehave proof that he yielded to the influence of the romantic poet whoinfused new life-blood into the imaginative literature of the ItalianRenaissance. In their frank sensuousness, in their fulness of life, intheir unforced marriage of humanity to its environment, these verypictures are, however, essentially Pagan and Greek, not by any processof cold and deliberate imitation, but by a similar natural growth from abroad groundwork provided by Nature herself. It was the passionate andunbridled Dosso Dossi who among painters stood in the closest relationto Ariosto, both in his true vein of romanticism and his humorouseccentricity.

In the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ we have left behindalready the fresh morning of Titian's genius, represented by theGiorgionesque works already enumerated, and are rapidly approaching itsbright noon. Another forward step has been taken, but not without someevaporation of the subtle Giorgionesque perfume exhaled by the moredelicate flowers of genius of the first period. The _Worship of Venus_might be more appropriately named _Games of the Loves in Honour ofVenus_. The subject is taken from the _Imagines_[36] of Philostratus, arenowned Greek sophist, who, belonging to a late period of the RomanEmpire, yet preserved intact the self-conscious grace and charm of theHellenistic mode of conception. The theme is supplied by a series ofpaintings, supposed to have been seen by him in a villa near Naples, butby one important group of modern scholars held to be creations of theauthor's fertile brain. Before a statue of Venus more or less of thePraxitelean type--a more earthly sister of those which have been namedthe "Townley Venus" and the "Venus d'Arles"--myriads of Loves sport,kissing, fondling, leaping, flying, playing rhythmic games, some of themshooting arrows at the opposing faction, to which challenge merry answeris made with the flinging of apples. Incomparable is the vigour, thelife, the joyousness of the whole, and incomparable must have been thesplendour of the colour before the outrages of time (and the cleaner)dimmed it. These delicious pagan _amorini_ are the successors of theangelic _putti_ of an earlier time, whom the Tuscan sculptors of theQuattrocento had already converted into more joyous and more earthlybeings than their predecessors had imagined. Such painters of the North,in touch with the South, as Albrecht Duerer, Mabuse, and JacobCornelissen van Oostsanen, delighted in scattering through their sacredworks these lusty, thick-limbed little urchins, and made them merrierand more mischievous still, with their quaint Northern physiognomy. Tosay nothing on this occasion of Albani, Poussin, and the Flemishsculptors of the seventeenth century, with Du Quesnoy and Van Opstal attheir head, Rubens and Van Dyck derived their chief inspiration insimilar subjects from these Loves of Titian.[37]

The sumptuous _Bacchanal_, for which, we are told, Alfonso gave thecommission and supplied the subject in 1518, is a performance of a lessdelicate charm but a more realistic vigour than its companion. Fromcertain points of analogy with an _Ariadne_ described by Philostratus,it has been very generally assumed that we have here a representation ofthe daughter of Minos consoled already for the departure of Theseus,whose sail gleams white on the blue sea in the distance. No Dionysus is,however, seen here among the revellers, who, in their orgies, do honourto the god, Ariadne's new lover. The revel in a certain audaciousabandon denotes rather the festival from which the protagonists haveretired, leaving the scene to the meaner performers. Even a certainagreement in pose between the realistic but lovely figure of theBacchante, overcome with the fumes of wine, and the late classic statuesthen, and until lately, entitled _The Sleeping Ariadne_, does not leadthe writer to believe that we have here the new spouse of Dionysus solately won back from despair. The undraped figure,[38] both in itsattitude and its position in the picture, recalls the half-drapedBacchante, or goddess, in Bellini's _Bacchanal_ at Alnwick. Titian'slovely mortal here may rank as a piece of flesh with Correggio'sdazzling _Antiope_ in the Louvre, but not with Giorgione's _Venus_ orTitian's own _Antiope_, in which a certain feminine dignityspiritualises and shields from scorn beauty unveiled and otherwisedefenceless. The climax of the splendid and distinctively Titianesquecolour-harmony is the agitated crimson garment of the brown-limbeddancer who, facing his white-robed partner, turns his back to thespectator. This has the strongly marked yellowish lights that we findagain in the streaming robe of Bacchus in the National Gallery picture,and yet again in the garment of Nicodemus in the _Entombment_.

The charming little _Tambourine Player_, which is No. 181 in the ViennaGallery, may be placed somewhere near the time of the great works justnow described, but rather before than after them.

What that is new remains to be said about the _Assunta_, or _Assumptionof the Virgin_, which was ordered of Titian as early as 1516, but notshown to the public on the high altar of Santa Maria de' Frari until the20th of March 1518? To appreciate the greatest of extant Venetianaltar-pieces at its true worth it is necessary to recall what had andwhat had not appeared at the time when it shone undimmed upon the world.Thus Raphael had produced the _Stanze_, the _Cartoons_, the _Madonnas ofFoligno_ and _San Sisto_, but not yet the _Transfiguration;_Michelangelo had six years before uncovered his _magnum opus_, theCeiling of the Sixtine Chapel; Andrea del Sarto had some four yearsearlier completed his beautiful series of frescoes at the Annunziata inFlorence. Among painters whom, origin notwithstanding, we must group asVenetians, Palma had in 1515 painted for the altar of the Bombardieri atS. Maria Formosa his famous _Santa Barbara_; Lorenzo Lotto in thefollowing year had produced his characteristic and, in its charm offluttering movement, strangely unconventional altar-piece for S.Bartolommeo at Bergamo, the _Madonna with Ten Saints_. In none of thesemasterpieces of the full Renaissance, even if they had all been seen byTitian, which was far from being the case, was there any help to bederived in the elaboration of a work which cannot be said to have hadany precursor in the art of Venice. There was in existence onealtar-piece dealing with the same subject from which Titian mightpossibly have obtained a hint. This was the _Assumption of the Virgin_painted by Duerer in 1509 for Jacob Heller, and now only known by PaulJuvenel's copy in the Municipal Gallery at Frankfort. The group of theApostles gazing up at the Virgin, as she is crowned by the Father andthe Son, was at the time of its appearance, in its variety as in itsfine balance of line, a magnificent novelty in art. Without exercising atoo fanciful ingenuity, it would be possible to find points of contactbetween this group and the corresponding one in the _Assunta_. ButTitian could not at that time have seen the original of the Helleraltar-piece, which was in the Dominican Church at Frankfort, where itremained for a century.[39] He no doubt did see the _Assumption_ in the_Marienleben_ completed in 1510; but then this, though it stands in adefinite relation to the Heller altar-piece, is much stiffer and moreformal--much less likely to have inspired the master of Cadore. The_Assunta_ was already in Vasari's time much dimmed, and thus difficultto see in its position on the high altar. Joshua Reynolds, when hevisited the Frari in 1752, says that "he saw it near; it was mostterribly dark but nobly painted." Now, in the Accademia delle BelleArti, it shines forth again, not indeed uninjured, but sufficientlyrestored to its pristine beauty to vindicate its place as one of thegreatest productions of Italian art at its highest. The sombre,passionate splendours of the colouring in the lower half, so welladapted to express the supreme agitation of the moment, so grandlycontrast with the golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin istriumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, andawaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity ofwhich is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of theDeity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceilingof the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder withawe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, inher voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been criticised, andnot without some reason. Yet how in this tremendous ensemble, of whichher form is, in the more exact sense, the centre of attraction and theclimax, to substitute for Titian's conception anything more diaphanous,more ethereal? It is only when we strive to replace the colossal figurein the mind's eye, by a design of another and a more spiritualcharacter, that the difficulty in all its extent is realised.

[Illustration: _The Assunta. Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice_.]

Placed as the _Assunta_ now is in the immediate neighbourhood of one ofTintoretto's best-preserved masterpieces, the _Miracolo del Schiavo_, itundergoes an ordeal from which, in the opinion of many a modernconnoisseur and lover of Venetian art, it does not issue absolutelytriumphant. Titian's turbulent rival is more dazzling, more unusual,more overpowering in the lurid splendour of his colour; and he has thatunique power of bringing the spectator to a state of mind, akin in itsagitation to his own, in which he gladly renounces his power and rightto exercise a sane judgment. When he is thoroughly penetrated with hissubject, Tintoretto soars perhaps on a stronger pinion and higher abovethe earth than the elder master. Yet in fulness and variety of life, inunexaggerated dignity, in coherence, in richness and beauty, if not inpoetic significance of colour, in grasp of humanity and nature, Titianstands infinitely above his younger competitor. If, unhappily, it werenecessary to make a choice between the life-work of the one and thelife-work of the other--making the world the poorer by the loss ofTitian or Tintoretto--can it be doubted for a moment what the choicewould be, even of those who abdicate when they are brought face to facewith the mighty genius of the latter?

But to return for a moment to the _Assunta_. The enlargement ofdimensions, the excessive vehemence of movement in the magnificent groupof the Apostles is an exaggeration, not a perversion, of truth. Itcarries the subject into the domain of the heroic, the immeasurable,without depriving it of the great pulsation of life. If in sublimebeauty and intellectuality the figures, taken one by one, cannot rankwith the finest of those in Raphael's _Cartoons_, yet they preserve in ahigher degree, with dramatic unity and truth, this precious quality ofvitality. The expressiveness, the interpretative force of the gesture isthe first thought, its rhythmic beauty only the second. This is notalways the case with the _Cartoons_, and the reverse process, everywhereadhered to in the _Transfiguration_, is what gives to that overratedlast work of Sanzio its painfully artificial character. Titian himselfin the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia, and above all in the much-vauntedmasterpiece, _The Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_, sins in thesame direction, but exceptionally only, and, as it were, against hisbetter self.

Little wonder that the Franciscan Fathers were at first uncertain, andonly half inclined to be enthusiastic, when they entered into possessionof a work hitherto without parallel in Italian or any other art.[40]What is great, and at the same time new, must inevitably sufferopposition at the outset. In this case the public, admitted on the highfestival of St. Bernardino's Day in the year 1518 to see the vast panel,showed themselves less timorous, more enthusiastically favourable thanthe friars had been. Fra Germano, the guardian of Santa Maria de' Frari,and the chief mover in the matter, appears to have offered an apology tothe ruffled painter, and the Fathers retained the treasure as againstthe Imperial Envoy, Adorno, who had seen and admired Titian's wonderfulachievement on the day of its ceremonial introduction to the Venetians.

To the year 1519 belongs the _Annunciation_ in the Cathedral of Treviso,the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatlyoverstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaitsthe divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but thefoolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquelyill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment thebeautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due tothe Florentines and the Sienese--both sculptors and painters--south ofthe Alps, and to the Netherlanders north of them, during the whole ofthe fifteenth century, the essential triviality of the conception in theTreviso picture makes such a work as Lorenzo Lotto's pathetic_Annunciation_ at Recanati, for all its excess of agitation, appeardignified by comparison. Titian's own _Annunciation_, bequeathed to theScuola di S. Rocco by Amelio Cortona, and still to be seen hung high upon the staircase there, has a design of far greater gravity andappropriateness, and is in many respects the superior of the betterknown picture.

[Illustration: _The Annunciation. Cathedral at Treviso. From aPhotograph by Alinari_.]

Now again, a few months after the death of Alfonso's Duchess,--thepassive, and in later life estimable Lucrezia Borgia, whose characterhas been wilfully misconceived by the later historians and poets,--ourmaster proceeds by the route of the Po to Ferrara, taking with him, weare told, the finished _Bacchanal_, already described above. He appearsto have again visited the Court in 1520, and yet again in the early partof 1523. On which of these visits he took with him and completed atFerrara (?) the last of the Bacchanalian series, our _Bacchus andAriadne_, is not quite clear. It will not be safe to put the picture toolate in the earlier section of Vecelli's work, though, with all itsfreshness of inspiration and still youthful passion, it shows a furtheradvance on the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, and must bedeemed to close the great series inaugurated by the _Feast of the Gods_of Gian Bellino. To the two superb fantasies of Titian already describedour National Gallery picture is infinitely superior, and though time hasnot spared it, any more than it has other great Venetian pictures of thegolden time, it is in far better condition than they are. In the_Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_ the allegiance to Giorgiono hasbeen partly, if not wholly, shaken off; the naivete remains, but not theinfinite charm of the earlier Giorgionesque pieces. In the _Bacchus andAriadne_ Titian's genius flames up with an intensity of passion such aswill hardly again be seen to illuminate it in an imaginative subject ofthis class. Certainly, with all the beauties of the _Venuses_, of the_Diana and Actaeon_, the _Diana and Calisto_, the _Rape of Europa_, wedescend lower and lower in the quality of the conception as we advance,though the brush more and more reveals its supreme accomplishment, itspower to summarise and subordinate. Only in those later pieces, the_Venere del Pardo_ of the Louvre and the _Nymph and Shepherd_ of Vienna,is there a moment of pause, a return to the painted poem of the earliertimes, with its exquisite naivete and mitigated sensuousness.

[Illustration: _Bacchus and Ariadne. National Gallery. From a Photographpublished by the Autotype Company._]

The _Bacchus and Ariadne_ is a Titian which even the Louvre, the Museumof the Prado, and the Vienna Gallery, rich as they are in our master'sworks, may envy us. The picture is, as it were, under the eye of mostreaders, and in some shape or form is familiar to all who are interestedin Italian art. This time Titian had no second-rate Valerius Flaccus orsubtilising Philostratus to guide him, but Catullus himself, whose_Epithalamium Pelei et Thetidos_ he followed with a closeness which didnot prevent the pictorial interpretation from being a new creation ofthe subject, thrilling through with the same noble frenzy that hadanimated the original. How is it possible to better express the _Atparte ex alia florens volitabat Iacchus.... Te quaerens, Ariadna, tuoqueincensus amore_ of the Veronese poet than by the youthful, eagermovement of the all-conquering god in the canvas of the Venetian? Or toparaphrase with a more penetrating truth those other lines: _Horum parstecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos; Pars e divolso iactabant membraiuvenco; Pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant_? Ariadne's crown ofstars--the _Ex Ariadneis aurea temporibus Fixa corona_ of thepoem--shines in Titian's sky with a sublime radiance which correspondsperfectly to the description, so august in its very conciseness, ofCatullus. The splendour of the colour in this piece--hardly equalled inits happy audacity, save by the _Madonna del Coniglio_ or _Vierge auLapin_ of the Louvre,[41] would be a theme delightful to dwell upon, didthe prescribed limits of space admit of such an indulgence. Even here,however, where in sympathy with his subject, all aglow with the delightsof sense, he has allowed no conventional limitation to restrain hisimagination from expressing itself in appropriately daring chromaticharmonies, he cannot be said to have evoked difficulties merely for thesake of conquering them. This is not the sparkling brilliancy of thoseVeronese transformed into Venetians--Bonifazio Primo and Paolo Caliari;or the gay, stimulating colour-harmony of the Brescian Romanino; or themore violent and self-assertive splendour of Gaudenzio Ferrari; or themysterious glamour of the poet-painter Dosso Dossi. With Titian thehighest degree of poetic fancy, the highest technical accomplishment,are not allowed to obscure the true Venetian dignity and moderation inthe use of colour, of which our master may in the full Renaissance beconsidered the supreme exponent.

The ever-popular picture in the Salon Carre of the Louvre now known as_Alfonso I. of Ferrara and Laura Dianti_, but in the collection ofCharles I. called, with no nearer approach to the truth, _Titian'sMistress after the Life_, comes in very well at this stage. Theexuberant beauty, with the skin of dazzling fairness and the unboundhair of rippling gold, is the last in order of the earthly divinitiesinspired by Giorgione--the loveliest of all in some respects, the mostconsummately rendered, but the least significant, the one nearest stillto the realities of life. The chief harmony is here one of dark blue,myrtle green, and white, setting off flesh delicately rosy, the wholeenframed in the luminous half-gloom of a background shot through hereand there with gleams of light. Vasari described how Titian painted,_ottimamente con un braccio sopra un gran pezzo d' artiglieria_, theDuke Alfonso, and how he portrayed, too, the Signora Laura, whoafterwards became the wife of the duke, _che e opera stupenda_. It isupon this foundation, and a certain real or fancied resemblance betweenthe cavalier who in the background holds the mirror to his splendid_donna_ and the _Alfonso of Ferrara_ of the Museo del Prado, that thepopular designation of this lovely picture is founded, which probably,like so many of its class, represents a fair Venetian courtesan with alover proud of her fresh, yet full-blown beauty. Now, however, theaccomplished biographer of Velazquez, Herr Carl Justi,[42] comes forwardwith convincing arguments to show that the handsome _insouciant_personage, with the crisply curling dark hair and beard, in Titian'spicture at Madrid cannot possibly be, as has hitherto been almostuniversally assumed, Alfonso I. of Ferrara, but may very probably be hisson, Ercole II. This alone invalidates the favourite designation of theLouvre picture, and renders it highly unlikely that we have here the"stupendous" portrait of the Signora Laura mentioned by Vasari. Acomparison of the Madrid portrait with the so-called _Giorgio Cornaro_of Castle Howard--a famous portrait by Titian of a gentleman holding ahawk, and having a sporting dog as his companion, which was seen at therecent Venetian exhibition of the New Gallery--results in something likecertainty that in both is the same personage portrayed. It is not onlythat the quality and cast of the close curling hair and beard are thesame in both portraits, and that the handsome features agree exceedinglywell; the sympathetic personage gives in either case the same impressionof splendid manhood fully and worthily enjoyed, yet not abused. Thismeans that if the Madrid portrait be taken to present the graciousErcole II. of Ferrara, then must it be held that also in the CastleHoward picture is Alfonso's son and successor portrayed. In the lattercanvas, which bears, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the latersignature "Titianus F.," the personage is, it may be, a year or twoolder. Let it be borne in mind that only on the _back_ of the canvas is,or rather was, to be found the inscription: "Georgius Cornelius, fraterCatterinae Cipri et Hierusalem Reginae (_sic_)," upon the authority ofwhich it bears its present designation.

The altar-piece, _The Virgin and Child with Angels, adored by St.Francis, St. Blaise, and a Donor_, now in San Domenico, but formerly inSan Francesco at Ancona, bears the date 1520 and the signature "TitianusCadorinus pinsit," this being about the first instance in which thelater spelling "Titianus" appears. If as a pictorial achievement itcannot rank with the San Niccolo and the Pesaro altar-pieces, itpresents some special points of interest which make it easilydistinguishable from these. The conception is marked by a peculiarintensity but rarely to be met with in our master at this stage, andhardly in any other altar-piece of this particular type. It reveals apassionate unrest, an element of the uncurbed, the excessive, which oneexpects to find rather in Lorenzo Lotto than in Titian, whose dramaticforce is generally, even in its most vigorous manifestations, well undercontrol. The design suggests that in some shape or other the painter wasacquainted with Raphael's _Madonna di Foligno_; but it is dramatic andreal where the Urbinate's masterpiece was lofty and symbolical. StillTitian's St. Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in steadfastnessand intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in thehumility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocentoaltar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of amaster of the full Renaissance. An improved version of the upper portionof the Ancona picture, showing the Madonna and Child with angels in theclouds, appears a little later on in the S. Niccolo altar-piece.

[Illustration: _St. Sebastian. Wing of altar-piece in the Church of SS.Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]

Coming to the important altar-piece completed in 1522 for the PapalLegate, Averoldo, and originally placed on the high altar in the Churchof SS. Nazzaro e Celso at Brescia, we find a marked change of style andsentiment. The _St. Sebastian_ presently to be referred to, constitutingthe right wing of the altar-piece, was completed before the rest,[43]and excited so great an interest in Venice that Tebaldi, the agent ofDuke Alfonso, made an attempt to defeat the Legate and secure themuch-talked-of piece for his master. Titian succumbed to an offer ofsixty ducats in ready money, thus revealing neither for the first northe last time the least attractive yet not the least significant side ofhis character. But at the last moment Alfonso, fearing to make an enemyof the Legate, drew back and left to Titian the discredit without theprofit of the transaction. The central compartment of the Bresciaaltar-piece presents _The Resurrection_, the upper panels on the leftand right show together the _Annunciation_, the lower left panel depictsthe patron saints, Nazarus and Celsus, with the kneeling donor,Averoldo; the lower right panel has the famous _St. Sebastian_[44] inthe foreground, and in the landscape the Angel ministering to St. Roch.The _St. Sebastian_ is neither more nor less than the magnificentacademic study of a nude athlete bound to a tree in such fashion as tobring into violent play at one and the same moment every muscle in hissplendidly developed body. There is neither in the figure nor in thebeautiful face framed in long falling hair any pretence at suggestingthe agony or the ecstasy of martyrdom. A wide gulf indeed separates themood and the method of this superb bravura piece from the reposefulcharm of the Giorgionesque saint in the _St. Mark_ of the Salute, or thehealthy realism of the unconcerned _St. Sebastian_ in the S. Niccoloaltar-piece. Here, as later on with the _St. Peter Martyr_, those whoadmire in Venetian art in general, and in that of Titian in particular,its freedom from mere rhetoric and the deep root that it has in Nature,must protest that in this case moderation and truth are offended by aconception in its very essence artificial. Yet, brought face to facewith the work itself, they will put aside the role of critic, andagainst their better judgment pay homage unreservedly to depth andrichness of colour, to irresistible beauty of modelling andpainting.[45] Analogies have been drawn between the _Medicean Faun_ andthe _St. Sebastian_, chiefly on account of the strained position ofthe arms, and the peculiar one of the right leg, both in the statue andthe painting; but surely the most obvious and natural resemblance,notwithstanding certain marked variations, is to the figure of Laocoonin the world-famous group of the Vatican. Of this a model had been madeby Sansovino for Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and of that model a cast waskept in Titian's workshop, from which he is said to have studied.

In the _Madonna di S. Niccolo_, which was painted or rather finished inthe succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccolo de'Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote issuavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not extravaganceof technique. The composition must have had much greater unity beforethe barbarous shaving off, when the picture went to Rome, of thecircular top which it had in common with the _Assunta_, the Ancona, andthe Pesaro altar-pieces. Technically superior to the second of thesegreat works, it is marked by no such unity of dramatic action andsentiment, by no such passionate identification of the artist with hissubject. It is only in passing from one of its beauties to another thatits artistic worth can be fully appreciated. Then we admire the raptexpression, not less than the wonderfully painted vestments of the _St.Nicholas_,[46] the mansuetude of the _St. Francis_, the Venetianloveliness of the _St. Catherine_, the palpitating life of the _St.Sebastian_. The latter is not much more than a handsome, over-plumpyoung gondolier stripped and painted as he was--contemplating, ifanything, himself. The figure is just as Vasari describes it, _ritrattodal' vivo e senza artificio niuno_. The royal saint of Alexandria is asister in refined elegance of beauty and costume, as in cunningelaboration of coiffure, to the _St. Catherine_ of the _Madonna delConiglio_, and the not dissimilar figure in our own _Holy Family withSt. Catherine_ at the National Gallery.

The fresco showing St. Christopher wading through the Lagunes with theinfant Christ on his shoulder, painted at the foot of a staircase in thePalazzo Ducale leading from the Doge's private apartments to the SenateHall, belongs either to this year, 1523, or to 1524. It is, so far as weknow, Titian's first performance as a _frescante_ since the completion,twelve years previously, of the series at the Scuola del Santo of Padua.As it at present appears, it is broad and solid in execution, rich andbrilliant in colour for a fresco, very fairly preserved--deserving, infact, of a much better reputation as regards technique than Crowe andCavalcaselle have made for it. The movement is broad and true, therugged realism of the conception not without its pathos; yet the subjectis not lifted high above the commonplace by that penetrating spirit ofpersonal interpretation which can transfigure truth without undulytransforming it. In grandeur of design and decorative character, it isgreatly exceeded by the magnificent drawing in black chalk, heightenedwith white, of the same subject, by Pordenone, in the British Museum.Even the colossal, half-effaced _St. Christopher with the InfantChrist_, painted by the same master on the wall of a house near the TownHall at Udine, has a finer swing, a more resistless energy.

[Illustration: _St. Christopher with the Infant Christ. Fresco in theDoge's Palace, Venice. From a Photograph by Alinari_.]

Where exactly in the life-work of Titian are we to place the_Entombment_ of the Louvre, to which among his sacred works, other thanaltar-pieces of vast dimensions, the same supreme rank may be accordedwhich belongs to the _Bacchus and Ariadne_ among purely secularsubjects? It was in 1523 that Titian acquired a new and illustriouspatron in the person of Federigo Gonzaga II., Marquess of Mantua, son ofthat most indefatigable of collectors, the Marchioness Isabella d'EsteGonzaga, and nephew of Alfonso of Ferrara. The _Entombment_ being a"Mantua piece,"[47] Crowe and Cavalcaselle have not unnaturally assumedthat it was done expressly for the Mantuan ruler, in which case, as somecorrespondence published by them goes to show, it must have been paintedat, or subsequently to, the latter end of 1523. Judging entirely by thestyle and technical execution of the canvas itself, the writer feelsstrongly inclined to place it earlier by some two years orthereabouts--that is to say, to put it back to a period pretty closelyfollowing upon that in which the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_were painted. Mature as Titian's art here is, it reveals, not for thelast time, the influence of Giorgione with which its beginnings weresaturated. The beautiful head of St. John shows the Giorgionesque typeand the Giorgionesque feeling at its highest. The Joseph of Arimatheahas the robustness and the passion of the Apostles in the _Assunta_,the crimson coat of Nicodemus, with its high yellowish lights, is suchas we meet with in the _Bacchanal_. The Magdalen, with her featuresdistorted by grief, resembles--allowing for the necessary differencesimposed by the situation--the women making offering to the love-goddessin the _Worship of Venus_. The figure of the Virgin, on the other hand,enveloped from head to foot in her mantle of cold blue, creates a typewhich would appear to have much influenced Paolo Veronese and hisschool. To define the beauty, the supreme concentration of the_Entombment_, without by dissection killing it, is a task of difficulty.What gives to it that singular power of enchanting the eye andenthralling the spirit, the one in perfect agreement with the other, isperhaps above all its unity, not only of design, but of tone, ofinforming sentiment. Perfectly satisfying balance and interconnection ofthe two main groups just stops short of too obvious academic grace--thewell-ordered movement, the sweeping rhythm so well serving to accentuatethe mournful harmony which envelops the sacred personages, boundtogether by the bond of the same great sorrow, and from themcommunicates itself, as it were, to the beholder. In the colouring,while nothing jars or impairs the concert of the tints taken as a whole,each one stands out, affirming, but not noisily asserting, its ownsplendour and its own special significance. And yet the yellow of theMagdalen's dress, the deep green of the coat making ruddier theembrowned flesh of sturdy Joseph of Arimathea, the rich shot crimson ofNicodemus's garment, relieved with green and brown, the chilling whiteof the cloth which supports the wan limbs of Christ, the blue of theVirgin's robe, combine less to produce the impression of great pictorialmagnificence than to heighten that of solemn pathos, of portentoustragedy.

Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the Doge'schapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette aboutthe altar,[48] with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and thekneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of thealtar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion.

The _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, which Titian finished in 1526, afterhaving worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps themasterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces ofexceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at theFrari, the _Assunta_. For ceremonial dignity, for well-ordered pompand splendour, for the dexterous combination, in a composition of quitesufficient _vraisemblance_, of divine and sacred with real personages,it has hardly a rival among the extant pictures of its class. And yet,apart from amazement at the pictorial skill shown, at the difficultiesovercome, at the magnificence tempered by due solemnity of the whole,many of us are more languidly interested by this famous canvas than weshould care to confess. It would hardly be possible to achieve a moresplendid success with the prescribed subject and the material at hand.It is the subject itself that must be deemed to be of the lower and lessinteresting order. It necessitates the pompous exhibition of the Virginand Child, of St. Peter and other attendant saints, united by aninvisible bond of sympathy and protection, not to a perpetually renewedcrowd of unseen worshippers outside the picture, as in Giorgione's_Castelfranco Madonna_, but merely to the Pesaro family, so proud intheir humility as they kneel in adoration, with Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop ofPaphos (Baffo), at their head. The natural tie that should unite thesacred personages to the whole outer world, and with it their power toimpress, is thus greatly diminished, and we are dangerously near to acondition in which they become merely grand conventional figures in adecorative ensemble of the higher order. To analyse the general schemeor the details of the glorious colour-harmony, which has survived somany drastic renovations and cleanings, is not possible on thisoccasion, or indeed necessary. The magic of bold and subtle chiaroscurois obtained by the cloud gently descending along the two giganticpillars which fill all the upper part of the arched canvas, dark in themain, but illuminated above and below by the light emanating from thedivine putti; the boldest feature in the scheme is the strikingcinnamon-yellow mantle of St. Peter, worn over a deep blue tunic, thetwo boldly contrasting with the magnificent dark-red and gold banner ofthe Borgias crowned with the olive branch Peace.[49] This is anunexpected note of the most stimulating effect, which braces thespectator and saves him from a surfeit of richness. Thus, too, Titianwent to work in the _Bacchus and Ariadne_--giving forth a single clarionnote in the scarlet scarf of the fugitive daughter of Minos. The writeris unable to accept as from the master's own hand the unfinished _Virginand Child_ which, at the Uffizi, generally passes for the preliminarysketch of the central group in the Pesaro altar-piece. The originalsketch in red chalk for the greater part of the composition is in theAlbertina at Vienna. The collection of drawings in the Uffizi holds alike original study for the kneeling Baffo.

[Illustration: Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican. From the engravingby Henri Laurent.]

By common consent through the centuries which have succeeded the placingof Titian's world-renowned _Martyrdom of St. Peter the Dominican_ on thealtar of the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, in the vast Church of SS.Giovanni e Paolo, it has been put down as his masterpiece, and as one ofthe most triumphant achievements of the Renaissance at its maturity. Onthe 16th of August 1867--one of the blackest of days in the calendar forthe lover of Venetian art--the _St. Peter Martyr_ was burnt in theCappella del Rosario of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, together with one ofGiovanni Bellini's finest altar-pieces, the _Virgin and Child withSaints and Angels_, painted in 1472. Some malign influence had causedthe temporary removal to the chapel of these two priceless works duringthe repair of the first and second altars to the right of the nave. Nowthe many who never knew the original are compelled to form theirestimate of the _St. Peter Martyr_ from the numerous existing copies andprints of all kinds that remain to give some sort of hint of what thepicture was. Any appreciation of the work based on a personal impressionmay, under the circumstances, appear over-bold. Nothing could well bemore hazardous, indeed, than to judge the world's greatest colourist bya translation into black-and-white, or blackened paint, of what he hasconceived in the myriad hues of nature. The writer, not having had thegood fortune to see the original, has not fallen under the spell of themarvellously suggestive colour-scheme. This Crowe and Cavalcaselleminutely describe, with its prevailing blacks and whites furnished bythe robes of the Dominicans, with its sombre, awe-inspiring landscape,in which lurid storm-light is held in check by the divine radiancefalling almost perpendicularly from the angels above--with its singlestartling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore,with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that thecomposition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing,notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in theoverpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained andunnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called itsMichelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passinginfluence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some monthsat Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who,returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, hadremained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not theexaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric ofpassion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as itculminated in the _Transfiguration_? All through the wonderful career ofthe Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese _Entombment_, and going onthrough the _Spasimo di Sicilia_ to the end, there is this tendency toconsider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, apose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance. Muchless evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the _Stanze_and the _Cartoons_, in which true dramatic significance and thesovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand. The_Transfiguration_ itself is, however, the most crying example of thereversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work. In itare many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpassable majesty if wetake them separately. Yet the whole is a failure, or rather twofailures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same frame.Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is herestifled. In the _St. Peter Martyr_ the tremendous figure of theattendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies allfluttering in the storm-wind, is in attitude and gesture based onnothing in nature. It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studiedattitude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind. In thesame way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who inthe moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic andconventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing forthe point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, allthe same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the _dramatis personae_of the gruesome scene--extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immenseeffect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity thatcan come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, mustever have its feet firmly planted on earth. Still, could one come faceto face with this academic marvel as one can still with the _St.Sebastian_ of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the magicof the painter _par excellence_ would assert itself. Very curiously itis not any more less contemporary copy--least of all that by LudovicoCardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable substitute for the original, at SS.Giovanni e Paolo--that gives this impression that Titian in the originalwould have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work. Thebest notion of the _St. Peter Martyr_ is, so far as the writer is aware,to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, whichhangs in the great hall of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Eventhrough this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties, especiallyin the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, withoutfurther carping, to accept Titian as he is. A little more and, criticismnotwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who,perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrowerrules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, bediscovered in Venetian painting, described it as _la piu compiuta, lapiu celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che altra, laquale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto_ (sic) _ancor mai_.

[Illustration: _Tobias and the Angel. S. Marciliano, Venice. From aPhotograph by Anderson_.]

It was after a public competition between Titian, Palma, and Pordenone,instituted by the Brotherhood of St. Peter Martyr, that the greatcommission was given to the first-named master. Palma had arrived at theend of his too short career, since he died in this same year, 1828. OfPordenone's design we get a very good notion from the highly-finisheddrawing of the _Martyrdom of St. Peter_ in the Uffizi, which is eitherby or, as the writer believes, after the Friulan painter, but is at anyrate in conception wholly his. Awkward and abrupt as this may seem insome respects, as compared with Titian's astonishing performance, itrepresents the subject with a truer, a more tragic pathos. Sublime inits gravity is the group of pitying angels aloft, and infinitelytouching the Dominican saint who, in the moment of violent death, stillasserts his faith. Among the drawings which have been deemed to bepreliminary sketches for the _St. Peter Martyr_ are: a pen-and-inksketch in the Louvre showing the assassin chasing the companion of thevictim; another, also in the Louvre, in which the murderer gazes at thesaint lying dead; yet another at Lille, containing on one sheetthumb-nail sketches of (or from) the attendant friar, the actualmassacre, and the angels in mid-air. At the British Museum is thedrawing of a soldier attacking the prostrate Dominican, which gives theimpression of being an adaptation or variation of that drawing by Titianfor the fresco of the Scuola del Santo, _A Nobleman murdering his Wife_,which is now, as has been pointed out above, at the Ecole des Beaux-Artsof Paris. As to none of the above-mentioned drawings does the writerfeel any confidence that they can be ascribed to the hand of Titianhimself.[50]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Herr Franz Wickhoff in his now famous article "Giorgione's Bilder zuRoemischen Heldengedichten" (_Jahrbuch der Koeniglich PreussischenKunstsammlungen_: Sechzehnter Band, I. Heft) has most ingeniously, andupon what may be deemed solid grounds, renamed this most Giorgionesqueof all Giorgiones after an incident in the _Thebaid_ of Statius,_Adrastus and Hypsipyle_. He gives reasons which may be accepted asconvincing for entitling the _Three Philosophers_, after a familiarincident in Book viii. of the _Aeneid_, "Aeneas, Evander, and Pallascontemplating the Rock of the Capitol." His not less ingeniousexplanation of Titian's _Sacred and Profane Love_ will be dealt with alittle later on. These identifications are all-important, not only inconnection with the works themselves thus renamed, and for the firsttime satisfactorily explained, but as compelling the students ofGiorgione partly to reconsider their view of his art, and, indeed, ofthe Venetian idyll generally.

[2] For many highly ingenious interpretations of Lotto's portraits and asustained analysis of his art generally, Mr. Bernard Berenson's _LorenzoLotto_ should be consulted. See also M. Emile Michel's article, "LesPortraits de Lorenzo Lotto," in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, 1896, vol.i.

[3] For these and other particulars of the childhood of Titian, seeCrowe and Cavalcaselle's elaborate _Life and Times of Titian_ (secondedition, 1881), in which are carefully summarised all the general andlocal authorities on the subject.

[4] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 29.

[5] _Die Galerien zu Muenchen und Dresden_, p. 75.

[6] Carlo Ridolfi (better known as a historian of the Venetian school ofart than as a Venetian painter of the late time) expressly states thatPalma came young to Venice and learnt much from Titan: "_C' egli appresecerta dolcezza di colorire che si avvicina alle opere prime dello stessoTiziano_" (Lermolieff: _Die Galerien zu Muenchen und Dresden_).

[7] Vasari, _Le Vite: Giorgione da Castelfranco_.

[8] One of these is a description of wedding festivities presided overby the Queen at Asolo, to which came, among many other guests from thecapital by the Lagunes, three Venetian gentlemen and three ladies. Thisgentle company, in a series of conversations, dwell upon, and embroiderin many variations, that inexhaustible theme, the love of man for woman.A subject this which, transposed into an atmosphere at once more franklysensuous and of a higher spirituality, might well have served as thebasis for such a picture as Giorgione's _Fete Champetre_ in the SalonCarre of the Louvre!

[9] _Magazine of Art_, July 1895.

[10] _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 111.

[11] Mentioned in one of the inventories of the king's effects, takenafter his execution, as _Pope Alexander and Seignior Burgeo (Borgia) hisson_.

[12] _La Vie et l'Oeuvre du Titien_, 1887.

[13] The inscription on a cartellino at the base of the picture,"Ritratto di uno di Casa Pesaro in Venetia che fu fatto generale di Stachiesa. Titiano fecit," is unquestionably of much later date than thework itself. The cartellino is entirely out of perspective with themarble floor to which it is supposed to adhere. The part of thebackground showing the galleys of Pesaro's fleet is so coarselyrepainted that the original touch cannot be distinguished. The form"Titiano" is not to be found in any authentic picture by Vecelli."Ticianus," and much more rarely "Tician," are the forms for the earliertime; "Titianus" is, as a rule, that of the later time. The two formsoverlap in certain instances to be presently mentioned.

[16] This picture having been brought to completion in 1510, and Cima'sgreat altar-piece with the same subject, behind the high-altar in theChurch of S. Giovanni in Bragora at Venice, being dated 1494, theinference is irresistible that in this case the head of the schoolborrowed much and without disguise from the painter who has always beenlooked upon as one of his close followers. In size, in distribution, inthe arrangement and characterisation of the chief groups, the twoaltar-pieces are so nearly related that the idea of a merely accidentaland family resemblance must be dismissed. This type of Christ, then, ofa perfect, manly beauty, of a divine meekness tempering majesty, datesback, not to Gian Bellino, but to Cima. The preferred type of the eldermaster is more passionate, more human. Our own _Incredulity of St.Thomas_, by Cima, in the National Gallery, shows, in a much moreperfunctory fashion, a Christ similarly conceived; and the beautiful_Man of Sorrows_ in the same collection, still nominally ascribed toGiovanni Bellini, if not from Cima's own hand, is at any rate from thatof an artist dominated by his influence. When the life-work of theConegliano master has been more closely studied in connection with thatof his contemporaries, it will probably appear that he owes very muchless to Bellini than it has been the fashion to assume. The idea of anactual subordinate co-operation with the _caposcuola_, like that ofBissolo, Rondinelli, Basaiti, and so many others, must be excluded. Theearlier and more masculine work of Cima bears a definite relation tothat of Bartolommeo Montagna.

[17] The _Tobias and the Angel_ shows some curious points of contactwith the large _Madonna and Child with St. Agnes and St. John_ byTitian, in the Louvre--a work which is far from equalling the S.Marciliano picture throughout in quality. The beautiful head of the St.Agnes is but that of the majestic archangel in reverse; the St. John,though much younger than the Tobias, has very much the same type andmovement of the head. There is in the Church of S. Caterina at Venice akind of paraphrase with many variations of the S. Marciliano Titian,assigned by Ridolfi to the great master himself, but by Boschini toSanto Zago (Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 432). Here the adapterhas ruined Titian's great conception by substituting his own trivialarchangel for the superb figure of the original (see also a modern copyof this last piece in the Schack Gallery at Munich). A reproduction ofthe Titian has for purposes of comparison been placed at the end of thepresent monograph (p. 99).

[18] Vasari places the _Three Ages_ after the first visit to Ferrara,that is almost as much too late as he places the _Tobias_ of S.Marciliano too early. He describes its subject as "un pastore ignudo eduna forese chi li porge certi flauti per che suoni."

[19] From an often-cited passage in the _Anonimo_, describingGiorgione's great _Venus_ now in the Dresden Gallery, in the year 1525,when it was in the house of Jeronimo Marcello at Venice, we learn thatit was finished by Titian. The text says: "La tela della Venere nuda,che dorme ni uno paese con Cupidine, fu de mano de Zorzo daCastelfranco; ma lo paese e Cupidine furono finiti da Tiziano." TheCupid, irretrievably damaged, has been altogether removed, but thelandscape remains, and it certainly shows a strong family resemblance tothose which enframe the figures in the _Three Ages, Sacred and ProfaneLove_, and the "_Noli me tangere_" of the National Gallery. The same_Anonimo_ in 1530 saw in the house of Gabriel Vendramin at Venice a_Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, from the hand of Giorgone, which,according to him, had been retouched by Titian. It need hardly bepointed out, at this stage, that the work thus indicated has nothing incommon with the coarse and thoroughly second-rate _Dead Christ supportedby Child-Angels,_ still to be seen at the Monte di Pieta of Treviso. Theengraving of a _Dead Christ supported by an Angel_, reproduced in M.Lafenestre's _Vie et Oeuvre du Titien_ as having possibly been derivedfrom Giorgione's original, is about as unlike his work or that of Titianas anything in sixteenth-century Italian art could possibly be. In theextravagance of its mannerism it comes much nearer to the late style ofPordenone or to that of his imitators.

[20] _Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen_, Heft I. 1895.

[21] See also as to these paintings by Giorgione, the _Notizia d' Operedi Disegno_, pubblicata da D. Jacopo Morelli, Edizione Frizzoni, 1884.

[22] M. Thausing, _Wiener Kunstbriefe_, 1884.

[23] _Le Meraviglie dell' Arte_.

[24] The original drawing by Titian for the subject of this fresco is tobe found among those publicly exhibited at the Ecole des Beaux Arts ofParis. It is in error given by Morelli as in the Malcolm Collection, andcuriously enough M. Georges Lafenestre repeats this error in his _Vie etOeuvre du Titien._ The drawing differs so essentially from the frescothat it can only be considered as a discarded design for it. It is inthe style which Domenico Campagnola, in his Giorgionesque-Titianesquephase, so assiduously imitates.

[25] One of the many inaccuracies of Vasari in his biography of Titianis to speak of the _St. Mark_ as "una piccola tavoletta, un S. Marco asedere in mezzo a certi santi."

[26] In connection with this group of works, all of them belonging tothe quite early years of the sixteenth century, there should also bementioned an extraordinarily interesting and as yet little known_Herodias with the head of St. John the Baptist_ by Sebastiano Luciani,bearing the date 1510. This has recently passed into the rich collectionof Mr. George Salting. It shows the painter admirably in his purelyGiorgionesque phase, the authentic date bearing witness that it waspainted during the lifetime of the Castelfranco master. It groupstherefore with the great altar-piece by Sebastiano at S. GiovanniCrisostomo in Venice, with Sir Francis Cook's injured but still lovely_Venetian Lady as the Magdalen_ (the same ruddy blond model), and withthe four Giorgionesque _Saints_ in the Church of S. Bartolommeo alRialto.

[27] _Die Galerien zu Muenchen und Dresden_, p. 74.

[28] The _Christ_ of the Pitti Gallery--a bust-figure of the Saviour,relieved against a level far-stretching landscape of the most solemnbeauty--must date a good many years after the _Cristo della Moneta_. Inboth works the beauty of the hand is especially remarkable. The head ofthe Pitti _Christ_ in its present state might not conclusively proclaimits origin; but the pathetic and intensely significant landscape is oneof Titian's loveliest.

[29] Last seen in public at the Old Masters' Exhibition of the RoyalAcademy in 1895.

[30] An ingenious suggestion was made, when the _Ariosto_ was lastpublicly exhibited, that it might be that _Portrait of a Gentleman ofthe House of Barbarigo_ which, according to Vasari, Titian painted withwonderful skill at the age of eighteen. The broad, masterly technique ofthe Cobham Hall picture in no way accords, however, with Vasari'sdescription, and marks a degree of accomplishment such as no boy ofeighteen, not even Titian, could have attained. And then Vasari's"giubbone di raso inargentato" is not the superbly luminous steel-greysleeve of this _Ariosto_, but surely a vest of satin embroidered withsilver. The late form of signature, "Titianus F.," on the stonebalustrade, which is one of the most Giorgionesque elements of theportrait, is disquieting, and most probably a later addition. It seemslikely that the balustrade bore originally only the "V" repeated, whichcuriously enough occurs also on the similar balustrade of the beautiful_Portrait of a young Venetian_, by Giorgione, first cited as such byMorelli, and now in the Berlin Gallery, into which it passed from thecollection of its discoverer, Dr. J.P. Richter. The signature "Ticianus"occurs, as a rule, on pictures belonging to the latter half of the firstperiod. The works in the earlier half of this first period do not appearto have been signed, the "Titiano F." of the _Baffo_ inscription beingadmittedly of later date. Thus that the _Cristo della Moneta_ bears the"Ticianus F." on the collar of the Pharisee's shirt is an additionalargument in favour of maintaining its date as originally given by Vasari(1514), instead of putting it back to 1508 or thereabouts. Among a goodmany other paintings with this last signature may be mentioned the_Jeune Homme au Gant_ and _Vierge au Lapin_ of the Louvre; the _Madonnawith St. Anthony Abbot_ of the Uffizi; the _Bacchus and Ariadne_, the_Assunta_, the _St. Sebastian_ of Brescia (dated 1522). The _Virgin andChild with St. Catherine_ of the National Gallery, and the _Christ withthe Pilgrims at Emmaus_ of the Louvre--neither of them early works--aresigned "Tician." The usual signature of the later time is "Titianus F.,"among the first works to show it being the Ancona altar-piece and thegreat _Madonna di San Niccolo_ now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican. Ithas been incorrectly stated that the late _St. Jerome_ of the Brerabears the earlier signature, "Ticianus F." This is not the case. Thesignature is most distinctly "Titianus," though in a somewhat unusualcharacter.

[31] Crowe and Cavalcaselle describe it as a "picture which has not itsequal in any period of Giorgione's practice" (_History of Painting inNorth Italy_, vol. ii.).

[32] Among other notable portraits belonging to this early period, butto which within it the writer hesitates to assign an exact place, arethe so-called _Titian's Physician Parma_, No. 167 in the Vienna Gallery;the first-rate _Portrait of a Young Man_ (once falsely named _PietroAretino_), No. 1111 in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich; the so-called_Alessandro de' Medici_ in the Hampton Court Gallery. The last-namedportrait is a work injured, no doubt, but of extraordinary force andconciseness in the painting, and of no less singular power in thecharacterisation of a sinister personage whose true name has not yetbeen discovered.

[33] The fifth _Allegory_, representing a sphinx or chimaera--now framedwith the rest as the centre of an ensemble--is from another and farinferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions. The so-called_Venus_ of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is, notwithstanding thesignature of Bellini and the date (MDXV.), by Bissolo.

[34] In Bellini's share in the landscape there is not a little to remindthe beholder of the _Death of St. Peter Martyr_ to be found in theVenetian room of the National Gallery, where it is still assigned to thegreat master himself, though it is beyond reasonable doubt by one of hislate pupils or followers.

[35] The enlarged second edition, with the profile portrait of Ariostoby Titian, did not appear until 1532. Among the additions then made werethe often-quoted lines in which the poet, enumerating the greatestpainters of the time, couples Titian with Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna,Gian Bellino, the two Dossi, Michelangelo, Sebastiano, and Raffael (33rdcanto, 2nd ed.).

[36] [Greek: Philostratou Eikonon Erotes.]

[37] Let the reader, among other things of the kind, refer to Rubens's_Jardin a Amour_, made familiar by so many repetitions andreproductions, and to Van Dyck's _Madone aux Perdrix_ at the Hermitage(see Portfolio: _The Collections of Charles I._). Rubens copied, indeed,both the _Worship of Venus_ and the _Bacchanal_, some time between 1601and 1608, when the pictures were at Rome. These copies are now in theMuseum at Stockholm. The realistic vigour of the _Bacchanal_ provedparticularly attractive to the Antwerp master, and he in more than oneinstance derived inspiration from it. The ultra-realistic _Bacchusseated on a Barrel_, in the Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg,contains in the chief figure a pronounced reminiscence of Titian'spicture; while the unconventional attitude of the amorino, or Bacchicfigure, in attendance on the god, is imitated without alteration fromthat of the little toper whose action Vasari so explicitly describes.

[40] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. p. 212.

[41] It appears to the writer that this masterpiece of colour andreposeful charm, with its wonderful gleams of orange, pale turquoise,red, blue, and golden white, with its early signature, "Ticianus F.,"should be placed not later than this period. Crowe and Cavalcaselleassign it to the year 1530, and hold it to be the _Madonna with St.Catherine_, mentioned in a letter of that year written by GiacomoMalatesta to Federigo Gonzaga at Mantua. Should not this last picture bemore properly identified with our own superb _Madonna and Child with St.John and St. Catherine_, No. 635 in the National Gallery, the style ofwhich, notwithstanding the rather Giorgionesque type of the girlishVirgin, shows further advance in a more sweeping breadth and a largergeneralisation? The latter, as has already been noted, is signed"Tician."

[43] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp.237-240.

[44] On the circular base of the column upon which the warrior-saintrests his foot is the signature "Ticianus faciebat MDXXII." This, takenin conjunction with the signature "Titianus" on the Ancona altar-piecepainted in 1520, tends to show that the line of demarcation between thetwo signatures cannot be absolutely fixed.

[45] Lord Wemyss possesses a repetition, probably from Titian'sworkshop, of the _St. Sebastian_, slightly smaller than the Bresciaoriginal. This cannot have been the picture catalogued by Vanderdoort asamong Charles I.'s treasures, since the latter, like the earliestversion of the _St. Sebastian_, preceding the definitive work, showedthe saint tied not to a tree, but to a column, and in it the group ofSt. Roch and the Angel was replaced by the figures of two archersshooting.

[46] Ridolfi, followed in this particular by Crowe and Cavalcaselle,sees in the upturned face of the _St. Nicholas_ a reflection of that ofLaocoon in the Vatican group.

[47] It passed with the rest of the Mantua pictures into the collectionof Charles I., and was after his execution sold by the Commonwealth tothe banker and dealer Jabach for L120. By the latter it was made over toLouis XIV., together with many other masterpieces acquired in the sameway.

[48] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life and Times of Titian_, vol. i. pp.298, 299.

[49] The victory over the Turks here commemorated was won by Baffo inthe service of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI., some twenty-three yearsbefore. This gives a special significance to the position in the pictureof St. Peter, who, with the keys at his feet, stands midway between theBishop and the Virgin. We have seen Baffo in one of Titian's earliestworks (_circa_ 1503) recommended to St. Peter by Alexander VI. justbefore his departure for this same expedition.

[50] It has been impossible in the first section of these remarks uponthe work of the master of Cadore to go into the very important questionof the drawings rightly and wrongly ascribed to him. Some attempt willbe made in the second section, to be entitled _The Later Work ofTitian_, to deal summarily with this branch of the subject, which hasbeen placed on a more solid basis since Giovanni Morelli disentangledthe genuine landscape drawings of the master from those of DomenicoCampagnola, and furnished a firm basis for further study.

"Vanitas" (Munich)"Venere del Pardo": see _Jupiter and Antiope_"Virgin and Child" (Mr. R.H. Benson)"Virgin and Child" (Florence)"Virgin and Child" (St. Petersburg)"Virgin and Child" (Vienna): see _Zingarella, La_"Virgin and Child with Saints" (Captain Holford)"Virgin and Child with four Saints" (Dresden)"Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John and St. Anthony Abbot" (Florence)"Virgin and Child with St. Joseph and a Shepherd" (National Gallery)"Virgin and Child with Saints, Angels, and a Donor" (Ancona)"Virgin and Child with SS. Stephen, Ambrose, and Maurice" (Louvre)"Virgin and Child with SS. Ulphus and Bridget" (Madrid)"Virgin with the Cherries, The" (Vienna)"Virgin with the Rabbit, The" (Louvre)